For this trip I was part of the ‘early crew’ who went in on Wednesday to setup the trucks and give the truckies a break. The weather was fairly nice; quite brisk in the morning and I didn’t bring any cold/wet weather clothing.
Setup day: Thursday. Our ‘car chief’ (Brian) broke his wrist, so we had to practice pit stop scenarios to see where we would best fit over the wall. Brian changed the outside rear tire, so we had to find his replacement. We ran through three different options and after that we loaded the truck and were able to then leave the circuit.
Friday morning we learned what the management staff decided on pit stop positions. They found Jeremy (the current air jack operator) was the best choice for the outside rear tire and that meant I would be running the air jack. Having never even touched an air jack, I was a little nervous about my new duties! We practiced stops every time the car came to pit, and they got better and were more natural every time. After the practice, Will (Nelson’s engineer) wanted to make a ‘diff’ change. Unfortunately we had a radiator leak we had to repair as well. Big time crunch! We had to rush out to pit lane before qualifying, fire the car, and get setup with only a couple of minutes to spare. We haven’t had very productive qualifying runs this year, so the results weren’t quite what we’d hoped. Dan garnered an 8th and Nelson a 12th.
Sunday was quite interesting. The forecast called for rain, at least 1” of it; and we got every bit of 1”! When we started the race, Andrew Ranger
got together with Nelson and gave him a flat right-front tire. So on the first lap we had to stop to change the flat – this was my first ‘race condition’ pit stop. It actually went quite well and was uneventful, which was a relief! After the green flag, we realized the radio antenna beneath the right side sidepod had not been connected and we couldn’t communicate with Nelson. This brought some problems! There was so much rain it was too dangerous to run and ChampCar red flagged the race. The red flag helped our radio situation; under red flag conditions the cars are released to work on. They ended up postponing the race for the day.
after the tires were done, which will slow down the fuel flow into the car. The stop was safe and my error really didn’t hurt our position so it wasn’t really a costly mistake. The crew chief came over after the stop to make sure everything was operating correctly and ask if something was wrong. I told him “No mechanical problems, I just forgot to pull out the air jack wand sooner!” Oh well. The rest of the stops were very good; we have an excellent crew! Nelson got offline and had a spin which took him back to 14th position. He was quite upset with himself at that point and had lost some focus. He would fight back to the front after Vince (the team manager) helped him calm 
down. Nelson was able to lead a few laps and managed to run the fastest laps of the race! Vince told him ‘I need you to run the best laps you’ve ever run!’ And he did! Unfortunately for us, we just didn’t have enough fuel to stay there. We made a late race pit stop for fuel and had to fix part of the rear wing during the stop. Only a few seconds of fuel and Nelson was on his way out of pit lane. He managed to get back out into the 3rd position after the stop. Dan had worked his way up to 3rd early in the race, but pit stops and 2 penalties put him back in 6th place by this point. He was able to quickly re-pass the Team Australia cars and get to 4th place, just behind Nelson. He ran a very smart race and it paid off for him! Other cars were slip-sliding away and crashing, but he kept a cool head and let everyone else make mistakes and then capitalize on them! We brought home a podium and 4th spot from an otherwise lackluster weekend!
Sometimes Mondays aren’t that painful! We managed to turn our strange Monday into something profitable. The race will be broadcast on September 6th at Noon on Speed Channel.
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