25 hours of Thunderhill
I just got back from the 25 hours of Thunderhill and I’m spent! We went there as defending race winners in E1 class from last year and we planned to do the same this year with three of the same drivers, myself Ken Dobson, and Mike Harvison. We are competing in the same Mazda MX5 but with a new team, Atlanta Motorsports Group and they are fresh off winning the 2009 Mazda MX5 cup Championship. All this sounds good but you also need to be a little lucky in a 25hr race that starts at 11am Saturday and ends at 12 noon on Sunday
I qualified the car on pole for E1 and beat out Todd Lamb who is the 2009 Mazda MX5 Cup Champion! I also started the race and the first few laps were very crazy with a 70 car field. The MX5 can go about an hour and 15 minutes on a tank of fuel. I got in a good grove so I stayed in the car for a second stint of fuel. Two and half hours went by very fast and I handed the car off to my teammate in first place. We cycled through our driver line up and I got back in the car at 10:30pm. I ended up doing a triple stint which kept me in the car until 2:30am! My left leg started to cramp so it was time to hand off the car, and get some sleep in the motor home. We had a six lap lead over second at this point. I woke up at 4:30am to find out that the right rear hub broke. The car was fixed and back on track but we are now two laps down to the leader of our class. Ken did a great job to get the car back up to the lead and just after he did that the leader broke and gave us back our lead. I got back in the car at 7:30am and did a single stint since we are now up eight laps over second place and we are just looking to conserve the car to the finish. And that we did!
In the end, we won the E1 class for a second year in a row! We raced 2200 miles over the 25hrs. None of our drivers made any mistakes and we only had one mechanical problem over the entire race. Pretty awesome team effort and such a cool race! Damn I want to race more!!!