Mid Ohio

I was at Mid Ohio. I never strapped into a race car, but I made the drive with my good friend and professional photographer extraordinaire Jose Rosado of Jose Rosado Photography (http://www.facebook.com/jorofoto?ref=ts ) and took along some of my own gear for fun. We went and took in the sights and sounds, and documented as much of them as we could. It's a beautiful piece of land that Mid Ohio sits on. The track looked like a lot of fun. The first race of the weekend was dominated by my buddy Chris Livengood. The kid's got a barrel of talent 50 feet deep, and he showed it. Took the lead on lap 1 and never looked back, opening up a huge lead. It was a great race to spectate, even better had I been in my car and had my team there with me.

Now that that's out of the way, I really decided to sit down and begin updating the site a lot more consistently. It was a rough end to the year for me, tacked onto an overall season that had a LOT of good but was very frustrating for the team and myself. To show up and not run at Mid Ohio was disappointing and in some ways I just needed to take a break, and step away for a while and collect myself. The series is really amazing, and I love Jessica Rabbit (the blue/white Van Diemen). I can't wait for next year, I just hope it resembles nothing of my rookie year. I need to keep the car out of the wall and in one piece, we have to get our mechanical troubles under control and I need to find more speed and consistency in the seat. I feel I made great strides towards the end of the year in expanding my ability, and pushing myself as well as ramping up the aggression to take advantage of openings I was previously a little too meek to take advantage of.

Lap 1 of race 2 at Road America in a car that had a vendetta against me from the beginning I was able to jump from 19^th to 12^th. Eventually The “Batmobile” dropped the shims out of the left rear suspension, but up until then I think we said a lot with that performance. Especially with the things we went through mechanically with that car just to get it to drive. It came off the trailer unable to drive in a straight line. The steering rack had a dead zone in it ½ turn big, and at 145mph it was not fun. That was quite literally the first time a race car has ever scared me. I came into the pits after one lap in practice 1 and told the guys “this thing is going to kill me.” I was ready to wrap up the weekend right there. 145Mph and the thing is wandering half a track left and right with me having no way to control it. But, after a pep talk from Tadley and some changes it got a little better. Eventually we had it straightened out after qualifying and we went on to put together great runs for what the car allowed us.

Looking forward, I'm taking this off season and going back to school to finish up my English and creative writing degrees, and we're also looking at our options within the team to make next year the greatest possible success we can. I will keep updating this website as a blog at least once a week from here on out. See you guys next Sunday!

-Tim