Let the good times ROLL! May 4th 2009 - "Little Talladega"

The One Lap of America experience is more than just a cross counrty trek with a hundred fellow car nuts, when you are on the One Lap you are one big family for 1 wild week of street driving and road course racing. The One Lap is about all the great people that you meet along the way, sharing these incredible experiences with fellow racers, and you end up making some great friends along the way. The diversity of people that compete in the One Lap is also incredible. You have pro drivers like Tom Long competing along side with club racers; your average joe's doing it just for fun that have run the Cannonball since it's inception (26yrs) where it was a time to distance event on the public roads! To sum it up, the One Lap is about the great preople, cars, race tracks, cities and all the other bizarre stuff that you see along the way that you will never see any where else if you were not on the One Lap of America! Speaking of cars, the cars range from a sub-compact Honda Fit, to a full "race car" Hybrid Nissan Altima, to a full race Nissan Skyline R35 GTR with 800hp and everything else in between!

Today was a very WET day in Alabama! FINALLY I got almost 8 hours of sleep last night! I'm starting to feel like a human being again, and not in a zombie state from the living dead anymore. We are currently tied for 3rd place in the Luxury class after the Auto-X yesterday; our big girl didn't handle as well as the more nimble M3's and the S4. We got 4th in the Auto-X with my co-driver Andrew Carbonell behind the wheel. Andrew did an excellent job still with a time of 44.051 secs, and the prepped M3 4 door and the race Audi S4 were at 43.714 and 43.680. Not bad considering Carbonell made a 4000 lb elephant dance! The results are coming in late in the day, so I will be updating the results the next day in most cases for the prior day.

So, back on track... A very WET day indeed. We woke up again at friggin 6:45am because Troy (Derek's chief tech/tuner/engineer/maniac... j/k on the maniac part but it is sort of true, lol)...
so Troy is insistent on waking up early-- it's all good because it's actually a good thing to wake up early,... err on time that is.

Upon getting to the little Talladega track today just before 8am it had just stopped raining. I walked the track with Tom, Rhett, Mike Renner (BMW performance driving school instructor) and got a few good points from Tom. The track was soaked still but it looked like it had pretty good grip. The surface wasn't concrete, it was asphault with aggregate showing, and this type of surface has much more traction in the wet than concrete, just fyi.... (Sebring, for instance is all concrete and slippery as goose $h*t when it's wet...) So, we go out and there IS alot of traction. Ian Stewart goes out first, of course, he is #1, (meaning car #1) and ironically he ended up finishing in first place. Ian is an underspoken and an overachiever of sorts for a driver, undoubtedly one of the absolute best drivers in the One Lap. Ian's opportunity for pro-racing will come soon enough, this is one of the oddities of the racing world, the best don't always get a chance to race in Grand Am, American LeMans or the likes. But nonetheless an excellent driver! and friend!

OK... Back to reality.... haha..

The two GTR's got 2nd and 3rd most likely, and that is crazy because the track was wet and the GTR's are AWD (All Wheel Drive) where the GT2 that Ian was driving was RWD only. (Rear Wheel Drive (RWD) for some that may not know the acronym). Once again, these are unoffical results but kudos to Ian for piloting that beast. We are 17th in line to go out based on the results from Autobahn on the 1st day; which is our running order. By the time we got out it was the 5th run group and the track had dried a little bit and there wasn't much spray coming off the tires. I had a good run and some people that were timing laps said we were right there with the other M3's and S4. We were hoping that the rain would hold off, but we were not that lucky. Right before lunch the rain started coming down HARD!!! It was coming down in buckets! At this point we got on the phone and ordered pontoons, a rudder and a prop! The track was going to be a freaking lake. Take a look at the pics below, pheww.

So after some good conversation and a bbq sandwich it was time to hit it hard again for the 2nd run of the day. The rain had just stopped right before the 1st run group but the track was like a bowl of soup. I went out behind the Mitsubishi VR4. With Snow White's (the M5) big power and RWD, we felt we did VERY well, but will not know until later today.

We are now on our way to Tallahasse to drop off my 3rd co-driver Matt Hale. Just got into Tally now and dropping him off.

Sebring here we come!

We will be in Sebring tonight for tomorrow's event! We are waiting on the green GTR; they were doing a quick tune on the fly so they are 30 mins behind us... Now we are stopping at Fridays for some dinner and we will be getting into Sebring after midnight or so!

Check out the slide show below and you can click on the pictures to go to the whole album.

Until then.... we will check in tomorrow!

Check out the slideshow: