| sperry |
2009-05-25 09:29 AM |
The team really did a fantastic job. I'm most amazed at how sorted the car was... it was a breeze to drive, had no weird quirks, got great mileage, great tire wear, didn't complain when you flogged it, was extremely reliable, and just took our punishment all day long. I think our biggest problems were a sensor connector that came loose that made the car run rough off-throttle (we plugged it back in), an overheated distributor that caused the car to cut out in the top of 5th gear in the esses (we drove around it), and an adapter cable I made for running everyone's headsets w/ the radio that got flaky and caused the comms to drop intermittently (we switched to the pit board).
My first stint was a little under an hour, then on my second I was going to push to the finish (which would have been almost 2 hours) but the black flag brought me in at about 90 minutes. Then I drove another hour on Sunday. So, I got about 3.5 hours total over the weekend.
There were a lot of cars out there during the last 30 minutes as people dragged themselves out of the pits in hammered cars to take the checkered. I didn't count, but I would guess there were like 70 or 80 cars running on the last lap, though many of them were many many laps down. In fact, I think Michel counted late on day one and saw as few as 30 some-odd cars out on track.
We had four penalties over the weekend: Fred got pushed off track by so 80's themed Mustang and had to serve time in the penalty box for two-wheels-off. I got dinged for two-wheels-off, (though it was a bad call... watch the video I posted on You Tube and see if you can see me drop two wheels) and the team had to solve a long math word problem with lots of unit conversions in sharpie on the hood (does anyone know the conversion between calories and joules off hand? Yeah, neither did we. Thanks for the internet access via your phone Tyson!). Then on Fred's second stint, he passed under yellow and was forced to parade around the pits for a lap following the VW bus of shame with all the other folks that passed under yellow. And finally, I passed under yellow (I still don't know where or when, but the flagging was tough in a few spots, so I probably did it... passing under yellow had to be the most common infraction) and that was the writing on the roof penalty.
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