And they say golf is humbling. I suspect that there are plenty of racers that golf, but not as many golfers that race. Sebring brought us to our knees and served up a nice round of humility at a time when our team was really hoping for a strong showing. We went into the weekend with an extra day of testing and coaching with Tommy Archer. Tommy is well known in the road racing circuit and certainly amongst the viper community as the most experienced viper racer with more seat time both racing and factory testing then anyone in the world. After two days with Tommy, and the last two days with Neil working with the team, we just couldn't get the car optimized as we had hoped. With two full days of testing, and personally driving my car, Tommy felt the set-up was still "nervous". This is not a word I was fond of hearing with many, many concrete barriers and my first race weekend at Sebring.
Our goals for Sebring were to beat the best VRL times of last year which we did. Unfortunately, several other competitors did as well. The ones we knew would do well, did. So the whole bar was raised and while we didn't get embarrassed, we came home with a third in class. Overall, Sebring pretty much reminded us of so many things that we still need to learn. As the oldest track in America, Sebring is all about bumps, speed and changing surfaces. This combination created one of our most mechanically-challenged weekends ever with the Archer guys contending with the replacement of a litany of items like front and rear brakes, transmission, clutch, broken exhaust, blown header gasket, a rear view mirror that would not stick to the window, all topped off with a failure of my cool suit motor that triggered a literal melt-down of a switch in the dash that created enough smoke to give me my first real fire drill!! By Saturday, despite the fresh brakes, we were experiencing "long pedal" and tried to bleed out the air to improve the pedal travel that was now down to the floor. The problem with this (besides the psychological) is that the throttle pedal is positioned for a certain amount of brake pedal travel(for heal/toe) and when that changes so dramatically, your foot can simultaneously rollover the gas as the same time as braking. It is fair to say that between the brakes and no rear view mirror, the anxiety meter was running pretty good.
So, the good news is that I managed to knock several seconds off of my time from last year and broke into the 2:13's with a stock world challenge car. No McLaren, no dog box, no quaife, and no undisclosed "goodies". I am not sure how much longer I can hold off on some upgrades now that I feel I am chasing others in my class in what will be a tight points race. The reality is that I was not the only one with mechanical challenges and to put things in perspective, pro series generally get just a couple of 20 minute practice sessions - not two full days of test and tune. So what I am saying is no excuses. We played it conservative in the circumstances and came home with a clean car to race another day. It is what it is.
To conclude, we keep learning more and more about this sport. This past event was an important milestone for Roberts Racing as it marked our first full year of racing having started late last year. We have had twelve race weekends with 24 starts and have been lucky enough to never finish out of the top three in-class. We shouldn't dismiss this accomplishment, however, like all racers, we just want to win.
Ohio next with some big decisions ahead ...
