One Lap of America May 5 to May 12, 2007
Article provided by David Goodman

Introduction & Car Preparation
Day 1 | Day 2 | Day 3 | Day 4 | Day 5 | Day 6 | Day 7 | Day 8

Day 2, Sunday, May 6, 2007
The thunderstorms and the cockroaches at the Bluff View Motel outside of Mid-America kept me up most of the night. The rain continued into the morning as we made our way to the track and got ready to run. Activities were delayed an hour and a half for the promise of a break in the weather and sure enough the weather cleared a little around 10 o'clock. As we stood around waiting for the track to go green, I found out why Bob Murray is so damn fast. Apparently during the off-season he installed nitrous oxide in his car. He estimates that is turning 525 hp with the nitrous shot. He's going to be really hard to beat.

I had what I thought was a pretty decent run but it's really hard to tell with this level of competition. The One Lap organizers decided that we would only make one run here at Mid-America because of the weather. We finished our run around 11 o'clock, packed up the car and were on our way by noon. The drive to Salt Lake City Utah is 980 miles and I'm really glad we got a good head start on that.

So far the car is running great except for that pesky low RPM alternator light. It seems Neil has finally found the accelerator pedal and we are cruising along at 90 miles an hour. The scenery and landscape driving through Wyoming was stunning. The mountains were snow covered and the air was cold. We stopped for gas in Laramie and were still wearing our shorts from the mild Iowa afternoon. George got a picture of Neil pumping gas while the snow was falling. We made really good time driving through the mountains, sometimes hitting triple digits but trying to keep it reasonable. Even still, people were passing us like we were going backwards. One BMW M3 passed us doing about 110 and Neil says he took a bullet for the team because we passed him about 20 minutes later pulled over and found out that he got a ticket for that same 110. Dad called as we were on our transit to let me know that I won the event at Mid-America and tied in class points with Bob Murray but 40 points behind him in the overall standings. I was pretty happy with the results of day 2, 18th overall and tied for first in class is not too shabby.

We rolled into Tooele around 1:30 a.m after the grueling 980 mile drive Neil and I were both glad that was over. continue>