Road
Atlanta
Speedvision
World Challenge GT 2000
Our weekend at the Petite
LeMans went very well. We ended up with a strong 17th place
finish after starting 25th. Unfortunately we had some trouble
with car set up due to the small amount of practice that is normally
associated with a Speedvision event. The BF-Goodrich truck did not have
any tires for the first session so we had to run the first practice on
old tires from April. These tires were so bad I thought there was
something broken in the rear of the car. I stayed out the entire session
anyway to get some reconnaissance laps in, but unfortunately it did not
do the team any good as far as getting the car set up. Gordon and Adam
were able to make the car better each session. If we had one more
practice, I am sure we could have qualified at the same times as the
race, and finished a little higher up.
The competitors this year were
insanely fast when compared to last year’s Speedvision times. 6 cars
broke the qualifying record from ’99. The race was more of the same
with 12 or 13 guys all beating the last year’s fastest race lap. (We
came within a tenth of last year’s record) I had a great start, click
here for a short video clip. As soon as the lights went off, I
accelerated hard up the right side of the track. Fortunately the Viper
in front of me swerved to the middle so it opened up a nice lane to pass
the next 2 rows. Unfortunately, I ended up losing all the positions I
gained at the start during the restart after a full course yellow on the
3rd lap. A car off in turn one was the reason for the
caution. The big V8 American cars that I was able to get by at the start
simply out dragged me down the back straight after the re-start. From
there I started to pick off people one by one for the rest of the race.
There was plenty of action on the track with several of the leaders
having mechanical problems and others dropping out due to incidents. We
have some great footage from the in-car video. In the end, we finished
17th with the only damage being a right rear tail light lens
that lost its mounting screw and fell out toward the end of the race.
All in all we had a great weekend, we were close to the fastest cars in
the handling respect but we simply did not have the horsepower to run up
front that weekend.
Hank Cohn, our team mate for the
weekend also had a great run. He started from the 29th position and managed to work his way up to 23rd. Not too bad
for a car with a 90% stock 993 engine! He also finished the race with
the only incident being a rubber mark left by the right rear tire of a
BMW M3. Hank was trying to make a pass going into turn 7, but the BMW
closed the door and touched Hank’s left front bumper. Fortunately, a
little bug and tar remover washed the evidence away clean. Thank you to
everyone who was rooting for us, I hope we can give you guys a top 10
next time.
Cory Friedman |
