I guess I will start off with a positive: it didn't rain! After that not much good came from our weekend in Houston. I know I have mentioned before that we realized we needed to make some changes to our combination in order to go the next performance level, well we have made those changes and unfortunately it is taking a bit longer than we all had hoped to see the results.
We struggled in qualifying, finally sliding the car down a horrible race track during the last session to get into the field. I don't think we have ever tried on purpose to run that slow but the conditions, both the weather - hot and muggy - and the terrible track conditions, dictated it. The conditions Friday were difficult and the evening session is where everyone ran well, so when we missed it during the night session we knew we had our hands full when Saturday brought bright sunshine to a very marginal racetrack.
Our race day ended early, losing first round. I think we missed the set up but the track conditions certainly played a big part of our loss. Brandon Bernstein and Rod Fuller right in front of us did the same thing - smoked the tires immediately after the hit of the throttle - so I believe we never had a chance. The left lane was tricky all day as we saw a lot of cars throughout the day do the same thing. I hope they fix that place before we get back there next season.
I would like to explain something that will help you understand our slow start. At the end of last season we realized that we needed to get our car to move much harder in the early part of the racetrack. We couldn't afford to keep being 4 hundredths of a second slower to half track than the other top cars and hope we could make it back up in the back half of the run by running 330+ miles an hour and chase them down. We thought if we could pick it up early and keep the way the car ran in the back half of the racetrack we could be really be tough to beat.
The old adage of saying that sometimes you have to take a step back to make steps forward comes to mind here. We have taken a step back and decided to take our lumps for a race or two and try and make the big jump forward. We hired an assistant crew chief to come in and help Jim Dupuy. Our new assistant Keith Adams has experience in making cars run very quick early in the run, all of the cars he has worked on in the past have been one of the quickest, if not the quickest, cars in the class during the early part of the track. In doing so we have had to make some changes to some parts we run and our thought process and trying to do this and lose runs due to weather has only slowed down the process.
I think we have started to see the light at the end of the tunnel. Trying to combine theories has been a little difficult but I believe in Houston we finally got on the same page. We saw some good progress and actually stayed over on Monday to test to help speed up the changes.
I think we will see the benefits coming to light at our next race in Las Vegas. If you remember last year the Vegas race is where our season really started to turn for the better. We raced to our first final round of the season there and I am hoping the trend continues this season, this time with a win.
Thanks for reading,