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Story by Jack Baruth

The good news from today’s NASA National Championships can all be seen in the photo: I’m alive and the #187 Neon doesn’t have a scratch on it. That’s the end of the good news.

The bad news can also be seen in the photo. Notice the front wheel; it’s different. That’s because, during the pace car “out lap” of the championship race, a fifty-cent tire valve failed and deflated our left front tire. We had no choice but to dash into the pits – but this ain’t NASCAR, and we don’t change tires in the pits. While the race started for the other seventeen cars in the “Performance Touring E” class, I drove to the garage where the crew performed a thirty-second tire change. I rejoined the race two and a half laps down.

Imagine the heartbreak, then, to find out that I could easily keep pace with the class leaders as they battled for position ahead. We’d have had solid heat for the front-runners today, but instead I was stuck trying to unlap myself. When a twenty-minute Safety Car period occurred just short of the halfway point, allowing the leaders to come back around to my back bumper, I realized that we were done for the year.

With ten minutes left to go in the race, I decided to push the car to its limits – but the limit can be a tricky thing with mismatched tires, and I soon found myself sailing off-track into the grass and losing all the time I’d gained in my charge. We finished seventeenth of eighteen cars.

Our friends in the Pakistan Express team finished a respectable fourth despite blowing a head gasket on the final lap, and Michael Mills finished third in the German Touring Series race. So the news wasn’t bad all-around. We returned home to find that Hurricane Ike had basically shut off the power – so once my laptop’s battery winds down, we’ll have nothing to do but sit in the dark.

On days like this, Formula One drivers always say “For sure, it was a day to forget.” So there you have it. We showed our pace over the course of the week in both wet and dry conditions, but when it mattered we were defeated by a fifty-cent tire valve. What can you do? A day to forget, for sure.