Nextel
250 at Homestead, 2001
When we initially planned to go to Homestead, our intentions were to
leave Charleston on Tuesday at about 1:00pm. Funding for the race
did not come through like we'd hoped, so we discontinued preparing the
car and began to work on other projects. In fact, our second
driver Adam Merzon had made other business plans and was in Sacramento
when we received a call from Lynn Wilson on Tuesday at 3:00pm.
Lynn told us that he might have a sponsor lined up for us, and he would
let us know as soon as possible.
Work quickly shifted back to the RSR, which was still in bad shape from
Daytona, which was now WAY behind schedule. Work continued until
1:30am Wednesday morning fitting the bodywork to replace the damaged
pieces from Daytona. After only a few hours sleep, work resumed on
the alignment, and the sponsor was confirmed at around 10:00am
Wednesday. Tweeks became our
primary sponsor for the race thanks to Lynn Wilson and John Dunkle of Rennlist.com.
As soon as the alignment was complete, the car was sent to the body shop
for a quick coat of paint while the trailer was being loaded, and the
car literally dried in the trailer on the 12hr trip to Miami. The
trip started exactly 24 hours late, when we finally got underway at 1:00
Wednesday.
To further add to the adventure, the crew in the transporter had to pick
up a driver and engineer at the Miami airport at 1:00 am Thursday, with
a 42 foot trailer. Not an easy task.
The purpose of this race was not entirely to be competitive. We
did the best we could to tune the car, but we were working with the
engine and transmission untouched from Daytona. So we were down on
power on top of being way down to the water cars already. Our
primary objective for this race was to maintain points for Cory and
Adam.
The race itself was quite uneventful. I don't believe there was
contact between cars the entire weekend. We qualified the car as
well as we could, though we were fighting understeer and right-rear tire
wear problems due to the fact that we hardly knew which way the track
went. Our hope was that the 3R's would be forced into 2 stops
during the 250 mile race, while we only required 1. This would
have off-set the speed differential, but unfortunately, most teams got
by with only 1 stop.
Knowing that we were walking on thin ice with this engine, Cory took it
quite easy through his first session of the race to make sure the car
would go the distance, or at least last long enough so that Adam could
get points for the race as well. Fortunately, bad never came to
worse and the car finished without any problems at all.
The engine was torn down immediately after this race and showed how thin
the ice actually was. We found 3 broken valve springs, 2 broken
case studs, and 3 cylinders with excessive leak-down. Obviously
the car was way down on power and the drivers did well to finish in 24th
position, 8th in class not to mention keeping it together the entire
race.
This race can be considered a great success despite a rather mediocre
finish. Cory now sits in the top 10 in Grand-Am points for the GT
class, by far the most competitive in the series, and Adam is in 12th,
only 4 points behind Cory. After all, this was our goal for the
race. |
