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There were some early indications that this would be a trying weekend. We witnessed a roll over on both days of practice. Both cars were patched up in time for the race, however. Saturday morning the cars were all lined up on the grid according to qualifying times which put our Atlanta Motorsports Group Mazda MX-5 4th in class with a lap time of 2:05.933.
This also put us right in the middle of a very diverse field of cars. Some of the machinery that would be competing were purpose built open and closed cockpit prototypes like the Norma M20F fielded by Davidson Racing, the awesome FWD Audi TT-RS of 034 Motorsports, and into the more recognizable racers like BMW M3s and plenty of Mazda Miatas. It was clear how busy the race would be looking at qualifying times across the board. The overall pole was set by the Factory 48 Motorsports Radical at 1:42.315 in the ESR class, which meant we’d be seeing them every handful of laps.
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| The Hankook Tire – El Diablo BMW M3 was the winner of the E0 class. They also set the fastest class time of 1:57.085. |
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| We had a pair of F-15s give us a flyover courtesy of our Air Force, and then all the teams headed back into the pits for the start. |
It was a clean start for most everybody. Our team was fielding an E0, E1, and our E2 car, all MX-5s. The two faster cars both were struck by differential problems early forcing the team to do a differential swap in each car in just the first few hours, but this is a long race, and we were all ready to settle into a groove.
All of the teams were counting on only having scheduled pit stops for fuel and driver changes. We found we could go about an hour and a half on our maximum of 10 gallons of fuel per stop. For the first two full driver rotations, each of the drivers in our car took double stints to start which had us in the car for about 3 hours at a time. For being such a long race focused on endurance there were quite a few incidences of contact between many of the cars in the field, but it’s difficult staying out of everyone’s way. It’s especially difficult with the huge disparity in speeds between the fastest class, ESR, and the slowest, E3.
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| MPTCC pilot Richie Ho and the APM-StopTech-Scion Racing Team brought out their new Scion FR-S racer. We may be seeing Richie and the APM boys in this new toy at next year's MPTCC. |
