Paul
Revere 250 at Daytona
July
1, 2004
The Paul Revere is the second Daytona event on the Grand-Am calendar.
Reminiscent of its title, the race is run entirely at night.
However, most of our practice and qualifying were held during the day,
where the temperature on pit lane was over 100 degrees with the sun
beating down. Compared to the favorable conditions of this year's
24, lap times were poor.
We had an
incredibly strong driver line-up for this race. Cory Friedman and
Leh Keen have been dominating PCA Club racing in GT3 Cup cars.
Despite not having the power of an '04 car, we were optimistic for a
podium finish.
Both the car and
drivers were going strong, and we were 2nd on the timesheet in the
practice before qualifying. Cory burned off a quick qualifying lap
which put us in 2nd for most of the session. By the end of the
session, though we were edged into 4th place, less than half a second
from 2nd.
The start of the
race went as expected with Cory running in very close proximity to the
2nd and 3rd qualifying TPC Cup cars. Friedman managed to fight his
way up to 2nd before being hit hard by the #36 TPC car who presumably
was carrying way too much speed to attempt a pass through the relatively
slow turn 1. The cars impacted twice and Cory's windshield was
covered in coolant. Not wanting to damage the engine, Cory stopped
on course and was towed back to pit lane. As it turns out, the
coolant was from the TPC car's radiator and we needed only to pull the
bent fenders off the tires to continue. The lost track time was
only around 15-20 minutes, but that certainly ruined any chance of a
podium or even top 5 finish. Leh's pace was strong, though the
damage was already done, and our finish was a very disappointing 9th in
class and 30th overall.
We are encouraged to run as well as we did, but frustrated that the
results do not reflect our performance. Regardless, our crew and
drivers did a great job, and we'd like to thank them as well as our
sponsors, KeenCap, Meadowchase Farms, and MedMD. The next Grand-Am
event on our schedule is Mid Ohio in August |
