Mosport International Raceway, outside Tortonto, was our first event of two in Canada this season.  I heard fantastic things about this track and I was very excited about racing there.  I showed up a day before everybody else so I could get a chance to walk the entire thing with Owen.  He has raced and won here before so local knowledge was extremely helpful.  I could tell after our walk that this place was going to be extremely incredible to drive, and it didn’t disappoint.

Mosport is one of the fastest, hairiest, most fun tracks I’ve ever raced.  The turns are all high speed, very flowing and there are huge elevation changes, which I love.  The track rewards being gutsy and it is instantly one of my top 3 favorite tracks.

I qualified in 8th place, a good spot to be in for the start at Mosport. I got bumped up to 7th on the grid because of a tech infraction on one of the Mustangs just in front of me.  I had a really fun stint.  For much of the time I had a great battle with one of the Kinetic M3s.  We traded positions probably 10 different times.  When I finally pitted to hand over to Owen I was in 7th place and the car was running well.  The only thing that worried me was that I had to pit a little earlier than expected because the car was out of gas sooner than it should have been.  Did I just use up too much fuel in my battling with the Kinetic car or was there another, more serious issue with the car?  If we had a pickup problem, it would be odd to find out now, but with our luck I couldn’t rule anything out.  Owen drove a great stint, making up positions very quickly and soon he was back up to the front.  He came in for one last fueling, but again, he came in earlier than expected.  Not good.  Would we have enough to make it to the end?  With no yellow flag period up to this point, I was starting to get worried.  We were only about 10 laps to the end and sitting in 5th place.  Then the car started to stumble again.  Owen called over the radio that he didn’t think it was going to make it to the finish, even though by our fuel calculations we should have been fine.  Three times in one race is not a coincidence, we now knew that there was a problem.

Owen pitted for fuel from 5th place, handing the position to Jeff Segal, our teammate who was running behind us.  Owen re-entered and made one lap before the only full course caution of the race came out.  The race finished under caution and we managed a 7th place at the checker.  Our team car, the 09 car that was behind us when we pitted for fuel for the last time, finished on the podium in 3rd.  On the lap just prior to the caution, one other car pitted for fuel, promoting him to 4th and then during the full course caution the 3rd place car ran out of fuel.  Had our car not had the fuel pickup problem, it would have been us on the podium.  Woulda, Coulda, Shoulda…

Seventh is a good result, and I should be happy to finish in the top 10 and on the lead lap, a first for us in this troublesome season, but it just seems that lady luck is still not in our corner.