How did I get myself into this wonderful situation you ask? Well, one of my friends that I autocross with has a cousin that is the crew chief for the team, and when he knew he was coming up here he sent along a couple of tickets. Matt's (autocross guy) girlfriend wasn't really interested and told him to bring me along, and viola! I am at Road America!
We showed up on Saturday morning, just after the qualifying session had ended, but there was still a lot of work to do for the Bimmerworld team to make some last minute adjustments to the cars for Sunday morning's race. We hung out with Matt's cousin for a bit and I asked probably more questions than he thought was possible, and then we took off to see the track and get some photos of the 4-hour ALMS race that started at 4 on Saturday.
Both of us were pretty fond of the 007 James Bond Aston Martin running around in British Racing green with a big ol' Union Jack on the roof. I have quite a few pictures of this car.
Matt managed to take over 1500 pictures on a camera he just bought a couple of days prior to the weekend, talk about breaking it in!! It was a good thing that I had brought my laptop, we were able to download the photos to the hard drive Saturday night so he could start fresh Sunday morning for the Bimmerworld race.
So, on to the race, James was qualified in fourth, Seth in 6th and Nick in 14th (he had food poisoning and was nearly puking in the car). James moved a spot down at the start but started charging pretty quickly to get up to third place behind Saini and Kleinubing. Couple of laps later he was chomping hard on the back tires of Kleinubing and a lap or two later he was through at turn 5! Now James is leading a Speed Touring Car race with only a handful of laps to go. He managed to pull out a gap of about 1.5 seconds at the checkered and won his first world challenge event! I would like to think it was all because Matt and I were there, but someone said something about preparing, practicing, and even setting up the car. What do they know?
So, we ended the weekend on a high with the team having gotten one driver on the box, and jumped into the car for our 5 hour drive home that turned into more like 7 once we got detoured 87 miles and stopped for dinner in Wisconsin. It was a great trip, we saw a ton of gorgeous cars, and let me tell you, those CTS-V Cadillacs in the Speed GT champioship are serious. I mean they shake the ground when they roll by, it is seriously impressive.
I didn't realy realize how much I missed the big tracks until I was up there watching the races. I think Matt and I both have gotten the bug for a little track time, and Erin/wallet willing, I will get my booty on up to Brainerd now that they have redone it without the dragstrip and take a few hot laps. Who knows, maybe I will find myself enrolled in a racing school somewhere, maybe Bondurant?
Don't forget to watch the race August 20th (greatest day ever in history) at 1:00PM ET on Speed, you will not see me, but you will see an exciting race!
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