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build diary August 24, 2008: There's an old saying in racing: "To finish first, you must first finish". However, Bill was only a hair over 0.1 seconds behind and was also gunning for the record. He spent part of the week fitting a front sway bar to the Westfield and fixing a bushing problem that had one front wheel moving back and forth by about an inch (yikes!). So he was primed for battle. Me? I left the Seven in the trailer after the Open House. It's not that I'm cocky, I just didn't have anything I could do other than replay the track in my mind. The weather was hot with a high of 96. That's not good for lap times, and the turbocharged Westfield was down on power. I attacked the track, looking for little hidden pockets of time and found a couple of unexpected spots. On my second session, I did manage to knock a tenth of a second off my previous time, dropping the record to 1:01.893. I'm not even sure what lap it was, honestly, as I didn't think I had any clean ones in that session. I'd been fighting a wayward tail on the car. Later in the day, I was driving more cleanly and taking advantage of my newfound little secrets in the track, but the high track temp prevented the times from dropping any further. Bill turned a 1:02.187 - not exactly slow, but not quite as quick as he had been last week. So that's a successful day. Everyone else went slower than they had the week before, in some cases by a fairly significant amount. That one quick lap helped me knock a little more time off the record and keeps me safe for a while longer. Whew! Now it's time to park the Seven for a while, as I'm leaving for the Targa Newfoundland in two weeks. entry 1429 of 1439 |