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Story by Jack Baruth
We’ll make this quick: It’s time for the 2008 NASA National Championships, and your Speed:Sport:Life team is there to provide the appropriate amount of schadenfreude for our readers and fans. Live timing and scoring can be found throughout the day at
http://drivenasa.com/liveresults/
so if you’re bored beyond belief, why not check it out? This year, the site is represented by the #187 PTE car run by yours truly, a Lapis Blue 1995 Plymouth Neon Sport, and the #416 GTS-5 BMW M3 of MSR Houston Director of Track Operations Michael Mills.
Today’s been a tough, but interesting, day. During the morning session, I was on the way to our fastest-ever time, predicted by my on-board Traqmate as a 1:44.7, when I went off backwards at Turn 11 and thoroughly dusted-up our valiant little Plymouth. (As opposed to our little Plymouth Valiant. Get it?) The second session started off nearly as discouragingly when I ruined our Hankook race tires by flat-spotting them at the entrance to Mid-Ohio’s Carousel turn. Luckily we had a brand-new set of Hoosier R6es from Phil’s Tire Service, so we spent the last session of the day carefully scrubbing them in. Despite my inability to put together a really top-notch lap in any of these sessions, we’re still hovering around the middle of the timesheets. At the end of the evening, we discovered that my “off” had reset our rear camber to zero. If we can fix that tomorrow and realign the car, we should be able to ride our new Hoosiers into the 1:44 range – not enough to win, but enough to see the edge of the podium if our luck holds.
Friday and Saturday are the qualifying races. These six-lap scrambles will determine where we start for Sunday’s championship race, which should run about eighteen laps or forty minutes, whichever comes first. There’s rain on the horizon, which could reshuffle the competitive deck as thoroughly as it did for this past weekend’s F1 race.
Meanwhile, Michael Mills has been learning Mid-Ohio. He’s not yet where he wants to be, time-wise, but he’s seeing high speeds on the back straight and we expect he’ll pull within sniffing distance of the leaders tomorrow. It would be unwise to count him out of the running just yet.
More details as we have them. In the meantime, cross your fingers!
