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 4, Tuesday, May 8, 2007
We woke up to another beautiful clear morning, the venue for today's competition: Pueblo Motorsports Park in Pueblo, Colorado. We have high hopes for today's competition with the goal being to gain some ground back on a more technical, shorter race track. The theory being that on a more technical course our competition will have a harder time using their horsepower as an advantage.

The first run session went fairly well, the track felt good, and the car was running strong although I had a little problem pulling the car out of some of the slower turns. This is due to the new transmission gear ratios created with the new ring and pinion gears. The 8:39 ratio gives a transmission gears higher speeds but also requires more power to turn them. In this car the idea is to keep the turbo spooling and the boost up as much as you can. With higher gear ratios the RPMs are lower and it's harder to keep the turbo what we call, "on boost". Matt Hubbard in the 280Z was in my run session and according to Neil, ran a very sloppy run, apparently locking up the front tires at the end of the back straight. Although he looked fast, Neil thought I'd beat him by a small margin.

Stan and Ryan from Powerhouse II – a local shop in Boulder showed up and brought me a spare alternator just in case the one in my car dies. These are a great bunch of guys and Stan was one of the guys that helped me out two years ago on the One Lap when the shop rebuilt my transmission from 8 to 5 pm on a Sunday afternoon to get us back in the event. Neil has been doing a great job paying attention to my performance on the track and giving me pointers on how to improve my game. He recognizes that it is not just about going fast on the track but there is significant strategy involved in doing well in this event. One particular point he made was that I'm doing a very poor job launching the car at the beginning of my run sessions. As we stood around and discussed it, Matt came up and congratulated me on my 12th overall position in the morning, two seconds before he smiled and said "I took ninth".

This filled in a few more blanks for us as far as strategy is concerned. He's driving that car over the limit, and he flat spotted a tire in the process. I'm driving my car somewhere between 85% and 95% of its limits. He beat me in the morning but as Neil surmised in the morning as he continues to drive the car over the limit he is going to make an even bigger mistake and we are going to be right there to take advantage of it. So the strategy moving forward is to continue to keep the pressure on while driving consistently and safely under the cars limit, hoping he'll continue to drive the car over the limit to the point where he makes more critical errors.

Later we learned that he went to Brock and asked if he could replace that flat spotted tire. This brings up another set of issues. The rules of this event dictate that you have to run on the same set of tires throughout the event unless there is a safety issue with the tire or it was damaged by some outside cause. If you choose to change a tire that wasn't a safety issue or accidentally damaged you should no longer be able to score points in the event. Although changing that tire is a clear violation of the rules, were still confident in our abilities to beat them fair and square whether they changed that tire or not. So at this point we chose not to press the issue.

Sure enough, in the second session of the day, my launch was perfect, I drove the hell out of the car, Matt Hubbard spun the 280Z, and we won that contest. So at the end of day 4, we're in 16th position overall, the Murray/Hubbard team is 12th overall and our patient, constant pressure strategy is working. continue>