So quite a bit has happened since my last post, but I will try to keep it short and interesting.  Since my last update I had another 4th place in my MX5 race at Barber and then the series headed to my two home tracks: Autobahn Country Club and Road America. 

Long story short, at Autobahn I had what I thought to be a rather poor qualifying session and would start the race in 7th.  I should have been in the top 3 in qualifying as I was pretty quick in the earlier sessions but I made a few small mistakes on my quick qualifying lap.I made arespectable start and by the end of the first lap I was in 5th, challenging for 4th place.  However, I was soon required to run defensive lines for much of the race as I battled a hard-charging Ara Malkassian.  Ara was eventually able to get by me on one of the last laps and I was unable to fight back on the last lap and had to settle for 6th place.  I was pretty disappointed in my poor showing, but I couldn't dwell on that for very long because I had to start preparing for my 2nd race of the day!

No it was not a double-header weekend like New Jersey, I was fortunate enough to be pulling double-duty with an Aston Martin DBRS9 in Speed World Challenge GT!  This came about very last minute.  Originally, my dad was supposed to run this car, but he had some other commitments pop up at the last minute.  In place of withdrawing the entry and taking into account that we had nearly 100 customers of our dealership (Lake Forest Sportscars) and people from Aston Martin coming out to watch the race, he decided to let me take over for the weekend!  This was a dream opportunity for any driver, but there was one small problem: I had never even sat in the car before!!  It was a huge opportunity so I would stay late at the track and make sure I was comfortable with the cockpit of the car and how to operate all the switches etc.  To add even more pressure, we were having some software problems with the car and it caused us to miss most of the testing and practice sessions throughout the weekend.  On top of this, the car has virtually no aids to assist me: no Traction Control, no ABS, no Launch Control, and a street car gearbox (meaning I would have to heel and toe downshift); meanwhile, the frontrunners in the GT class have fancy sequential gearboxes and all sorts of electronic aids!  Simply put, it was just me and a 550hp V12; talk about a different experience than my 150hp Mazda MX5!

 The night before qualifying we made some MASSIVE setup changes so I can't say that the car was 100% happy during the session and we only manage d to qualify P17 out of the 22 car field.  However, it was a bit of a moot point as we were going to elect to start from the pit lane anyways.  We figured this was a safer alternative given that we had never done a standing start with the car and my bank account would be depleted if I were to scratch a wheel let alone get rear ended by a Corvette going 50mph faster on the start!  The pit lane start meant that I, unfortunately, did not get a warm up lap.  We had again changed the setup of the car overnight from qualifying, so this meant that I was starting the race on cold tires, with a completely new setup, in a car that I had maybe 20 minutes of seat time in!  To add further pressure, I did NOT have the option of spinning or crashing as we were running the car on a pretty tight budget and there were lots of LFSC guests at the track.  On the start of the race, I was held by the officials in pit lane as I had to wait for the rest of the 21 or so cars to go by before they could release me.  There were a couple of cars that had bad starts so I had to wait quite a while before I could get going.  I did not want to stall the car so I laid down some nice rubber and left a trail of smoke as I left pit lane and began my game of catch-up.  It turned out that we had a very good showing for our debut of the car as we moved up to finish in 9th place; and to get a top-ten finish out of a weekend like that was unbelievable.  To be honest, I didn't really do anything spectacular, I just stayed out of trouble and passed a few cars when the opportunities presented themselves.  Another nice boost to the weekend was that we secured the SCCA Pro Sunoco Hard Charger award for advancing the most amount of positions throughout the race!  So I was the hard charger and secured a top-10 in my World Challenge debut; cool!!  The car is magnificent to drive and sounds as good as it looks, I was just trying to do it justice.

To add onto an already fantastic day I was approached by my friends Greg Morris and Mike "Scoop" Heavey, who happen to also be fighter pilots and did the flyover of the race after the National Anthem was sung.  So just when I thought my day couldn't get any better, Mike offered for me to "ride" back with them!  So after an OK finish in my Mazda race and driving a V12 Aston Marting DBRS9 I was going to go up in a fighter jet!  It was one of the best experiences of my life.  It is absolutely unbelievable to experience that level of g-force (we were pulling close to 7gs), and especially to experience it three dimensionally.  As a racecar driver, I probably experience more lateral g-force than the average person, but when you roll an L39 warplane and have 7gs push you straight down into your seat, I'd be lying if I said I didn't come close to blacking out about 12 times!  I even got the chance to fly the plane for about 15 minutes, performing mock dog fighting maneuvers chasing Greg in the L29 and even getting to do some barrel rolls; what a rush!!!  A big thanks to Greg and Scoop for showing me an amazing time, and if anyone out there knows of a company or individual who would like to buy into a package of flight hours for one of the most thrilling rides of their life just let me know and I will hook you up with the pilots!

Well I'm getting a bit sick of writing at this point and probably only a small percentage of people are still reading by this point so I will sum up my Road America weekend VERY briefly.  We were going to campaign the Aston Martin again but we faced similar electrical issues so we figured it was best to pull the entry and truly fix the problem before racing it again.  I did, however, manage to run a few laps at Road America in it and it was a beautiful experience.  I qualified 5th for MX5 and was running as high as 3rd before one of my teammates had a braking problem and we made contact entering turn 5, where I got stuck in the gravel for a bit and barely managed to battle back to 10th place.  My teammate Jeff is still the best teammate in the world and I know it was truly not his fault as the ABS acts up sometimes in the MX5s; in fact, I almost took out my teammate Mark in the same turn a few laps earlier!

Now I am off to Miller Motorsports Park in Utah next weekend and we only have 2 races at VIR after that so time to get some points!  Well I should probably get back to work now, but as always, if you have any questions or comments feel free to shoot me an email or write me a message through my website.  Thanks to everyone who reads this and hopefully I will have some interesting news about the 2010 season in the near future!

Thanks,

Nick