The 2016 SCCA National Championship Runoffs at Mid-Ohio Sports Car Course
My last blog column was after the Great Lakes Major at Mid-Ohio and a lot has happened since then. It’s been a crazily busy summer. The team got a good result during our June visit to Mid-Ohio (2 Wins), and although we’ve had some hurdles thrown in our path, we’ve still have strong hopes for the SCCA Prototype 1 Championship this Friday morning/tomorrow.
Throughout the 2016 season, we’ve never quite been the frontrunner through practice and qualifying and in the actual races (west coast) it was pretty much the same. Unfortunately, we have not figured out and resolved the handling issues of the car #8 and thus we didn’t have the straight-up pace to compete for the wins. We can constantly compete for second place, we just haven’t found a way to take the car to next level, were we have the pace to compete for a win.
All week there has been a solid team effort from the guys in the paddock, they’ve worked diligently on car #8; they want to win as much as I do! We think the culprit is the Williams differential. Why? Well it’s been a process of elimination, and theoretically the big adjustment to free up the differential makes sense. Bright and early this morning we went out and put down a blister lap of 1:19.5 an improvement of 1.8 seconds over our best lap. To put that in context, the current Mid-Ohio track record for P1 is 1:21.2. Unfortunately, two of my rivals went faster and our qualifying position for the national championship race is 3rd.
For the interested parties that want to watch the 30 minute race, it starts early at 9:55 AM eastern standard time. You can set an alarm in your phone, or watch the recorded race at your leisure at: http://www.scca.com/…/1980938-2016-sc…/event_sessions/latest
or http://www.scca.com/runoffs
You may need to enlarge the picture that’s on the right side
