From Mid-Ohio through the end of the season I have a new co-driver, Serge Glazunov Jr.  He competed in a few of the previous Koni Challenge rounds with another team and has joined us at Automatic Racing for the remainder of the season.  Mid-Ohio was the first chance for us to get to work together and we meshed right away.  Serge is a quick and serious young driver and we will be a good match; that much is obvious right away.

I had another good qualifying effort, despite never having been to the track before, but it didn’t come easy.  In fact, it came down to the final seconds of the session before I was able to turn my lap.  Our sessions are so short that if you don’t put a good lap down in the first few minutes you often don’t get a second chance. Traffic played a huge role today and I kept catching slower cars.  For most of the session I didn’t get to turn a fast lap.  I constantly had to sacrifice part of my lap to pass other cars or find a gap away from them. Finally my crew chief came over the radio and told me that time was winding down and that I needed to set a time, on this next time by, that it was my last chance.  I backed off one last time to catch a gap and it worked out beautifully.  I turned a 1:34.689, which put me in 6th place.  I was relieved to get a good lap and excited to put in another solid qualifying effort.

There’s not much to say about the race, except for more of the same bad luck… my stint was good and fairly uneventful.  I handed it over to Serge in 6th place but when he was leaving the pits, the car died and wouldn’t restart for almost a full minute.  We lost a ton of track position and even went a lap down. About 20 minutes into his run, he was hit hard by a car that missed its braking point. This broke something in the steering rack and snapped the power steering belt, which stalled the motor.  Another race ended early for us.  We could only look forward to Watkins Glen and our next chance.