5/10/09: Against better judgment, I’m writing this on the plane ride home… after a long night… with very little sleep. So, bear with me if the grogginess makes it through to the page.
I haven’t done well in Atlanta for the last few years and 2009 stuck with that trend. I think we did a great job of getting this car set up for the track–I could run full throttle for almost the second half of the course. The sound of that TRD NASCAR V8 at 9000RPM was awesome and I could hear the crowd screaming after a big burn. I’ll be honest I was having a blast! This set-up got us the number one qualifying spot, but my eagerness to attack in the tandem runs got us knocked out in the Round of 16.
The first tandem battle was against Calvin and it went smoothly. He had been fighting his car all day but put together great runs. I came a bit too close at one point and had to make a sizable correction but we still moved on. The next was a run against Ken Gushi in the other Scion TC. Leading I took a small advantage but following I still attacked, unfortunately. Coming into the first corner was cool, two Scion drift cars mirrored up sideways. I was enjoying it but Ken went into the apex a bit early. It forced him to hold the hand brake a bit longer than he had in previous practice runs I did with him and at that moment I realized my mistake. I was closing too fast. “Go Ken Go!” I was yelling in my helmet but he couldn’t. I didn’t hit him hard, just enough to rotate me into a slow spin. Obviously, it wasn’t his fault that I was leaving no room for error.
The Atlanta fans were awesome, FD MC Jared DeAnda was in rare form on the Mic and even Shawn, my tech, signed some boobs! The only downer was Pat’s DQ for soft tires. I won’t get into it because there are many that know more about this subject than I, but some of the testing procedures for illegal tires are much more suspect than the tires themselves. The current regulatory system is not doing its job of protecting the teams who are running legal tires, off the shelf, from those that may be modifying stock tires to improve their performance. I’ll leave it at that. Hopefully, Pat, your bogus situation will be a catalyst and get FD to rethink the tire regulatory methods.
Back to the point. After hitting Ken I proceeded to spin slowly. I kept my foot in it towards the end of the spin, probably out of frustration, and for a short time was standing still with the tires spinning at a calculated 105 MPH! The Hankook tire smoke billowing out of the car was ridiculous.
We put a video of some of our first runs of the weekend on Youtube. You can check them out here. Thank you Rockstar, Scion, AEM and Hankook for supporting the team, I’ll try to do better in NJ!
Click here for a video from the testing at Atlanta