1 Hour @ Daytona

I'd like to thank you guys for letting me run with you tonight. I had a great time and a great race, of course. Steve and I are already developing a nice healthy rivalry :-)

I was lucky to have snatched the position away from Steve early on in the race I do not recall the circumstances, I just remember him leaving the door open in a particular corner and I took the invitation. I was a tick faster in race trim and tried to open up a gap early on, until my rear tires screamed out in agony. From there I just tried to maintain the 1-2 second lead I had on Steve until the first stop.

Lap 16 and my scheduled pit stop. Slightly early in comparison to most everyone else, but the benefit to that is that I am on fresh tires while everyone else was on extremely worn tires for a few laps. After Steve pit I had a 16 second lead, which expanded to 22 seconds after a few more laps as he still had to get up to temp. By that time the deal was sealed and I cruised it home (forced into saving some fuel as well) while allowing much of the lead to dissipate.

Fun stuff... fun cars. Looking forward to next week

I had a bit of fun at the beginning following third place around. I was much faster on the straights but we were pretty even on the road course and I knew if I got in front the pressure from behind for a few laps might cause me to make a mistake, so I opted to put pressure on 3rd and hope he made a mistake. Whoever it was ended up over steering on the corner exit before the oval and spun it down into the grass.

From then on it was a pretty uneventful race. I pushed a little bit towards the end of the first stint to see if I had anything for the top two, when I realized they had a pretty good edge over me I laid back and drove the car hard enough to keep the gap to 4th from shrinking.

After the pit stop I cycled back into third and had a chance to at least follow Steve Boyer around but I got stupid for a minute and decided to pass him, getting myself into a pretty severe power slide that I barely saved, but giving him the opportunity to open up a good gap on me. If I had just played the same strategy I did at the beginning I am positive I could have hung with him in his draft and at least been around at the end in case he made a mistake.

Thanks to you guys for letting me join you, and special thanks to Tim M. for the setup help and HPDT classes he has taught. Sim Racing is getting to be more enjoyable the more I learn about setting up the cars and the more competitive I can be...

Learned a lot, I did. Ran my fasterst lap of the race right at the end...not sure if that's necessarily a good thing, but at least I made improvements. Many thanks to Bill for setup help...made an immediate 3 second difference, and I then made an adjustment to the front wing (lessened it 1 click) to make it more driveable for me (less wandering, but introduced a little push) for the race. Managed to take advantage of some folks' bad luck to improve position, and never took an agricultural excursion - a major victory for me!

Man guys. I appreciate and enjoyed all that was said here(above). Good job to you all, and I am glad Brooks opened the series up to more than CR member "Roadwarriors". :) ... with you Tim, Jimmy and Greg; the pleasure is ours. Maybe this 44 yr. old fart will be able to see some of that tire dust from you podium dudes! hehe