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 7, Friday, May 11, 2007
Friday morning at Mid-Ohio looked allot different than the last time I was here. Just a month earlier a late season snow had deposited an inch of the stuff on the track and we had to wait well into the morning before our first run session. Not today, the weather was beautiful and I had plenty of time to walk the track to refresh my memory.
Most people who visit Mid-Ohio rave about the design. Indeed it’s a first class course. What make it so special, I think, is that it requires a significant amount of skill and patience to drive it correctly. Just subtle changes to the driving line can have a great impact on lap times.

On this the last day of track competition for the 2007 One Lap it didn’t take long for talk to resume with Bob and Matt about yesterdays events and the significance of today. Still stunned from the loss at the drag strip, mechanical problems last night had delivered even more bad news to their campaign. After all that hard driving at O’Reilly, the Datsun had developed two cracked front brake rotors. By itself, replacing a brake rotor is a fairly simple job. In this case however, those guys found themselves in a big jam. This car had an aftermarket set of Wilwood racing calipers and rotors, for which they didn’t have spares. Their solution last night was to install a set of stock rotors (much smaller than the Wilwoods) and a set of four piston calipers from a Nissan Pathfinder. Just when they thought they were out of the woods, they discovered that the wheels would no longer fit over the brake assembly. At that point they picked up an angle grinder and manually ground the inside of the wheel center section so that the wheels would fit. Two new challenges now faced their team, one was terrible out of balance front wheels, there is no way they could still be true. The other was significantly diminished braking ability.

The strategy for today is to run conservatively and not make any mistakes. Those guys are running on little sleep, with diminished equipment, at a track they’ve never been before. I figure we can do more harm than good by overdriving the car. Matt went first in the morning and Neil timed both our runs so I knew immediately we had taken the morning session. It felt good to be at least tied up with the competition; we have been behind most of the event. The second run session went equally well. According to the unofficial timing, we had achieved our third win of the remaining four events and this had at least put us in a position to win the class.

The icing on the cake was a visit today from Margo Otay, a former One Lapper and fast friend who had flown in from Boston to see her brother Greg and boyfriend Damon compete. Unfortunately she only got to see Damon run, as Greg had demolished his car yesterday at O’Reilly. He was fine, but the car’s suspension was dead.

With only one more event to go we were looking pretty good. The drive to South Bend was relatively short and we arrived in time to have a sit down steak dinner. The festivities then moved to the hotel where the entire field spends most of the rest of the evening discussing the events of the week. Much of the conversation includes heavy usage of the words could of, would of, and should of and focuses on next year. continue>