With that lead in out of the way, and my video editor finally cooperating, now it's onto Saturday race day.
We arrived at the track by 7:30 am, with plans for an 8 am driver's meeting, a 9 am qualifying session, and a 10 am race start. The Saturday race was 7 hours, with checkered flag at 5 pm.
Jamie took the qualifying session and had the third fastest lap with a 2:06. Teams tend not to go all out in qualifying, so it would be interesting to see how other cars would fare come race time.
The main contenders on the grid seemed to be usual suspects for our series in recent years. An E36 BMW M3 and a Spec E46 BMW.
The one that caught my eye when we were lining up for the grid - A Porsche 996 GT3!
Complete with Dealer support from the red van you can see behind the car......
So yeah, we had our work cut out for us. You can hear my comment at the beginning of my full First Stint video. I trimmed this down to remove some of the early caution laps prior to green flag and some red flag down time mid stint. I ran the first 2 hours from 10 am to noon.
During that long caution that ultimately ended up in a red flag for cleanup, we discussed whether we should bring the car in for strategic reasons. The pit stops were required as 10 minutes minimum, which is about 5 laps lost in full green flag running. And if cars are circulating behind the safety car, you can get a stop done in 2 or 2.5 laps. Big difference! Ultimately we decided to keep the car out. They were not quite ready with gear on for fueling, and it was really early to lock in what might be our only strategic maneuver of the race. Keeping in mind that maximum driver stint length is 2 hours, so 3 stops are required, but you only have about 90 minutes of overall slack time to use for strategy adjustment.
I had started in 7th overall, lining up in the "A Class" line when gridding up. I made some passes and watched a lot of cars make mistakes in front of me while over driving the car, the track, or their own abilities.
I was able to consistent run laps in the 2:00-2:01 range, even with slower class traffic. And I managed a fast lap of around 1:59.5.
This has us classed solidly in the A class. We were in B class at Sonoma and in our first race with the car in Portland, before it could turn, we were in C class. There were about 30 cars at this race overall, and the top 8-10 would likely end up in the race contending class.
At the end of my stint, we were running in third place overall, and I was right on the tail of the second place Porsche. Several of the contending cars were really fast, but also made some mistakes in front of us. It was setting up to be a great race.
Jason drove the second stint, and continued to run in podium position throughout. There was one fast car, a Turbo Miata, that was running in first overall because they took advantage of the caution period during the first stint. Their pace was very similar to ours, but they had a couple laps on us due to strategy.
Jason had great pace as usual, and had our fast lap for the team on the day in the 1:58's. Overall race pace was very similar, and things were setting up nicely for us.
Jamie mentioned during Jason's stint that he thought I should go out third and let Jason finish the race to give our team a better chance to win. My race pace was around 5 seconds faster than his qualifying, so he was being it mainly on that and wanting to give the team the best chance.
We're amateur racers, and we don't spend all the time and money we do to go to the track and not race. I suggested to Jamie that if he wanted to help the team, we should put him in the car and use his stint for strategy. He would get in with about 3 hours left in the race, and the go in plan was to let him drive 2 hours, I would take the final hour or so.
Instead, we decided that once he was in the window for us to make one more stop, 2 hours 10 minutes to go, we would pit in the event of any incident or track conditions that likely signaled a long caution.
Once Jamie was in the car, we had around 2 laps to make up to the overall leader, and we were running in 4th at the time, with a high chance of a 3rd place finish. Jamie did great, he was around 2 seconds per lap off of our fastest race pace, plenty to keep us in the mix.
And with about 1 hours 45 mins to go, we got our chance. A car oiled down the track at turn 12 and Jamie was not far behind the incident. It happened at turn 12, so he had just a few turns to go before pit in. He radioed in and we were ready for our stop, to top it off with fuel and put me back in the car.
As it turned out, the oil down was severe, the E30 BMW had lost an oil cooler line and kept driving from turn 12 to pit in.
It took the safety crews over an hour to clean it up. I sat in the car by the pit out fence and our lap timer said 77 minutes (since we had entered pit in) when I went on track. That meant we had 20 minutes left, we were 2-3 laps behind, and the leading 3 cars needed to do a 10 minute pit stop.
They did 2 caution laps when we went out before restarting, and the cars that had not pitted needed to stop at the end of the first. So as it turned out, they would get a lap back, but we should still have around a lap available.
During the final stint, I was in full preservation mode. Jason was reminding me to keep it clean, and I wasn't taking chances with any risky passes in traffic. And I got the radio call with 2 flying laps to go that we had cycled to the lead on live timing. Not the lead in class, the overall lead!
I managed to bring it home with about a minute lead on the chasing cars. You can check out my fist pump at the end of the below video, not sure if there is much else to watch.
This is our first overall win in nearly 10 years. The last one was my second race at Laguna Seca. It definitely solidified my fondness for this track, and certainly made the minivan project worth it!
I hope you guys enjoyed reading, I will try to get up some fast laps for the TL;DR guys as well.
guessing from the setup comments it has the traditional MR2 snap oversteer as well 
