Yost Autosport at the 25 Hours of Thunderhill & VIDEO!

When qualifying came around it was dark, and the first time any of the competitors got the chance to drive at night during the race weekend. I (Mike Bonanni) was in the car to qualify and this particular event has a very unique set of challenges for qualifying. One, it’s the only race that qualifies in the dark and it’s the first time people get to see if whatever light setup their car is equipped with actually works. Lighting at night was a major problem for us at last year’s race; we just simply underestimated what we actually needed. We learned from that and through three other night races this year developed a new light package that was far and above what we ran a year ago. Others on the track weren’t so fortunate and a lot of cars slowed their pace way down in the night simply because they couldn’t see and with 65 cars total on track at once, it’s virtually impossible to get an entire lap in without running into traffic. Such was the case for me in qualifying and unfortunately I couldn’t get a clean enough lap to match our practice times. Regardless we qualified the car 22nd overall, not what we were hoping for, but we had 25 hours of racing to make up the difference.

During qualifying our team member came back to the track with two gigantic glass-pack mufflers to hopefully fix our sound limit problem permanently for the race. The only problem was they didn’t quite fit nicely into our current exhaust setup and our only option was to have them stick out from the rear of the car about 8” past the body work. We added more turn-away tips as added insurance since we wouldn’t be able to test the new setup before the race. Fortunately for us our new exhaust setup, affectionately nicknamed “the chili peppers”, did the trick and we ran the race without issue.