Alright!
When I last left off we left Dominion on quite the high after a superb rain drive by Matt netting us an 11th place overall finish in the afternoon! Our overall for the week hadn't shifted and we still sat in 14th overall.
The 720 mile drive to MI wasn't nearly as bad as we anticipated due to the oval being canceled due to rain. We arrived at our hotel in South Haven at 11:55pm which resulted in us being the luckiest lap puppies ever never arriving at a hotel after midnight.
Gingerman is home track for me and very familiar turf for the RS boys. We took the opportunity to not walk the track and bled brakes and rotated tires. Not that we were in dire need of either but we figured it prudent to prevent any last day drama.
Session 1 is where I knew I'd have the biggest advantage over those who've never been there and it went off great, I had a few spots I'd been playing over and over in my head that I usually mess up. I mostly nailed those. Woo! that resulted in a 12th overall finish for the morning.
Here's a one lap from that: youtube linky
My goal for the afternoon was to do more of the same and just manage the time as best I could knowing that some of the big HP cars would likely beat us in the afternoon now that they've sighted the track at speed. That happened. a big turbo 1M and a 5th gen z28 snuck past in the afternoon dropping my afternoon finish down to a 14th overall.
That kept us in 14th overall with just the dry skid pad to go. We had been chipping away points at the couple cars ahead of us but save for a significant bobble we weren't likely to move up in position but the teams in 15th and 16th overall were in easy striking range should we bobble.
Since we only had 60 miles to transit for the final day we stopped for ice cream at Shermans had far too much delicious frozen sugar then headed to the hotel for the final night party.
Saturday dawned and there was an odd feeling of emptiness. We didn't have to rush to an event to see the track before hot laps started, there was no car prep to be done and we knew after the skidpad we were done
Off to the skidpad, Things went well for us, we tied for 16th on the skidpad which we assumed would solidify us in 14th overall.
While watching other competitors we saw the 12th place GTR spin off through the lights effectively killing one direction of the skidpad. Could we move up?
Alas, no, Mike Maier who had been sitting 13th about 100 points ahead of us had an amazing run on the skidpad this bumped him up into the 12th spot and the GTR held 13th just 90 points ahead of us!
Still, we couldn't complain about finishing our first one lap 14th overall and 2nd highest rookie of the year behind Mike Maier!
A couple pictures from gingerman:
All done! we don't look as tired as we felt:
And we won our class! cool!
We've already started talking about next year (still 50.5 weeks away ugh!) and have a few ideas one of them being take my car instead of Matt's: