May 12-14 at Road America Raceway, WI
After Mid Ohio, we came home and began the thrash to rebuild the cars again. The 14 needs a motor badly and the 15 needs some bodywork repairs, namely a new front end. Amazingly when the time came to head east we were ready. The team had all marked this track on the calendar, its one of our favorites by far. We again only planned on running the 14 with our drivers Nik Romano, Matt Million and Ryan Keeley. On Friday we will use both cars in practice.
But where’s Keeley? Well he was buying every tire he could find to make it to Wisconsin, that is aer he swapped out our Ford for a Mack at another Penske. We haven’t even made it to the track and this was getting expensive. While waiting for him, we also went to Green Bay and bought a whole new set of Continental trailer tires. The tires and Keeley arrive about the same time. Late afternoon, he rolls in and we begin to get ready for the weekend.
Friday testing and qualifying goes well, but when we ran the car on the dyno, its still down on power. Something isn’t right but we cant figure it out. We did our final prep Friday afternoon and go out for a great Wisconsin team meal.
We are ready to run Saturday. 4 laps into the run and the radio call was unexpected, we have a problem. It was immediately diagnosed as another engine failure, this is getting old. We pull out the spare and begin the swap. Just prior to the checkered flag we have completed the swap and are ready to run for Sunday, we think… But something isn’t right so the boys worked deeper into the night and think they have it figured out.
Sunday Morning comes and the car fires up and cruises the paddock as if its ready so we pull onto the grid. No sense dragging this out, we didn’t finish one lap. Another engine failure. As we are packing up one of our competitors drops by and asks where we got our fuel. He mentioned other teams had found that their fuel from a couple stations in town was substandard, yes we had been to one of those stations, was this the cause of our weekends woes?
Its amazing the hard work put in by the entire team to run this program. it’s devastating to do all that work and to get only 4 laps of racing. Unbelievably the team is pointing to the next event in VIR and is excited to get back at it. Thank God we have 5 weeks, something has to give on this motor program.
Thank you to Bimmerworld, Apex Wheels, Red Line Oil, AGA Tools, Swift Springs, and Rugged Radios amongst others for all your support.
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