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| This is when I took over the car mid-race. Henri is out of the car on the right of the shot. In the ALMS, no work can be done on the car while the fuel is going in, which is why it is on the ground and the tires haven't been changed yet. |
I took over the car a little past an hour into the race, thankfully under caution, with the explicit instructions to A) not lose anymore laps trying to make up time (we have a couple of opportunities to make up lost laps under yellow, but making up multiple laps on pure pace is tough in such a short race with this good a field), and B) not to fuck up my tires because I wasn’t going to get any new ones after that set! I figured I could handle that. In fact, my stint proved to be straightforward enough; I never had anybody I was racing on the same lap, so other than fighting hard for position on restarts, but never had a lot of racing to do outside of working lapped traffic. There was one ‘moment’ that involved an ill-conceived outside pass in the 5th gear turn 7, marbles on my tires, going off, coming back on, and somehow not getting creamed by anybody in doing so, but it was smooth sailing for me otherwise.
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| I had a trouble-free stint, and was able to move up to third when a car ahead of us ran (literally) into trouble. We scored our first podium of the year! |
It was so smooth that when one of the PC leaders tangled with a GT car, the ensuing cloud of smoke and spinning cars being right out of Days of Thunder, I moved up to 3rd for our team’s best finish of the year and first podium! After struggling through the opening 3 rounds this year, finally bringing home a quality finish was fantastic for the whole team.
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| This is more like it! So happy for all of the Dempsey/Silicon Tech Racing guys. We've had a very rough year and we finally gave them something to cheer about. |
The next stop for the ALMS is north of the boarder at the Canadian Tire Motorsport Park, up until this year known as Mosport, east of Toronto. Mosport was the stage for my first win of the year in 2011, and is generally characterized as being unbelievably badass, so I cannot wait to get up there and try to build on our finish at Lime Rock.
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| Hopefull we can spray the champagne again this weekend in Mosport! |
