Well, I’m sitting in Chicago airport waiting for my flight to Vancouver. Morgan is waiting in a hotel in Milwaukee for his dad Gord to return from Mexico and then they will begin the long drive back to Vancouver.

We decided to treat the GT3 race yesterday as a test session. We were starting at the back and had little chance of finishing too high up. However, once the race started, the car was amazing and I was passing someone almost every lap. However about 20 minutes into the race, the engine shut off. I pulled off the race course, cycled the switches and it restarted. I pulled back onto the course and continued – after turning off everything that wasn’t essential for the car to run. I ran well for a while, and there was a full course yellow that allowed me to re-catch the leaders. When the green flag came out, we took off again, passing more cars. However the former race leader Mike Henderson who had pitted for repairs and came out right in front of me took off like he was shot from a gun. It was shocking just how fast he is. After that the problems came back, but I was always able to restart the engine after cycling the master power switch, and we made it to the end of the race, credited with 9^th.

So, after 4 days of testing, 4 days of qualifying and 3 days of racing we ended up with a 5^th place finish in GT Lite out of 21 competitors and a 9^th place finish in GT3 out of 18 competitors. We had 2 goals for the event. The first was to win both GT Lite and GT3. This goal remains on the to-do list. The 2^nd goal was to do better than we had ever done before and we achieved this in spades. In GT Lite, our lap times were competitive, we know what to do to close the gap to the leaders and our previous best finish was 12th. In GT3 we had a brand new car and we brought it home in one piece with lots of data for continued improvement.

In a year from now, we’ll do it all again!