I said I wasn’t going to do it, but I guess it wasn’t a bad idea (Matt).
The drive up started w/ me leaving Sunday at 10 pm and catching up w/ Al, Todd, David and Jeff in the RV. 1500+ miles of 60-65 mph is slow. After 3 blowouts on the trailers (1 for me and 2 for Al), a stop at Walmart in Denver to resupply the spare tire stock, a few hours sleeping in a rest area in Laramie, WY, we finally arrived in Tooele about 11 am Tuesday.
The track facilities are unreal! The place looks like it was built yesterday and there was no expense spared. the GP garages have their own private bathroom for each garage, a TV w/ live video feeds from T/S. the Timing and Scoring Control booth is unreal. 24+ cameras that caver the track, each w/ pan, tilt, zoom. All camera's feed to a DVR that is kept till the end of the day. The bathrooms for the poor folks have individual shower rooms. They have a door that provides privacy, a nice bench to sit on, they were just really nice. There was a cleaning crew there that hit each bathroom about 2 times a day. Everything was always clean! Free pit space was nice - all asphalt.
Wed - spent the day bedding brakes, heat cycling tires and learning the track. Got the times down to a 2:19 or so if I recall right. I managed to get a dyno slot and was shocked to see the car made 228/301 (226/297 is what it made in Texas).
The track has lots of run-off, gravel traps and such that hitting a wall is no real issue. So it was easy to push it a little. Hitting the curbs results in a lot of pad knock-back. at first I thought it was pad fade, but soon realized it was a dead pedal. Once I diagnosed the problem correctly, I resorted to just stroking the brakes on the sections between corners to get a good pedal feel under braking. This track requires a lot of "tweaking" of the set-up to to get the car to balance compared to tracks we run here. Normally I'll make 2 or so changes over a weekend, but at Miller I was making 3-5 per day from Wed thru Sat. a lot of it was due to the mix of high speed corners that resulted in an aero push, to low speed hairpin's that showed too much caster. It’s a fun track that has a good rhythm.
Thur - nothing to report really. made a bunch of tweaks to the car, had a nice qual session. ran a clean race. got put on the dyno post race - made 220/287. not sure why the numbers dropped, my guess is the 93 fuel in my tank was burned off finally and I was using 91. I was making 15 less HP the Dave B and likely the same w/ TQ.
Fri - shocked at Dave B's qual time. had me by .5 seconds. I thought for sure he was going to win that race.
Sat - was using practice to work on a few corners I was having issues w/. I knew Dave B was going to be tough. in the Champ race, I got a good start and managed to put a few CMC-2 cars behind me. from there on, I just put me head down, turned consistent laps, and watched my gap to 2nd. I'll post video as soon as I can.
There are tons of stories to tell about our own Texas folks, Cali Regional Directors, and NASA Brass. A good time was had by all.
Thanks to all for the well wishes and congrats. Thanks to Steve Mulder for his help, Jerry Jordan for his support, Mitch and Mike P for over the phone tech suport. Michael Mosty for helping me when I needed a hand.
A big thanks to Dave Balinget for putting on the best NASA Nats to date.
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Thursday night was the party night and everyone enjoyed the Shiner Bock keg that Todd and Al so graciously brought, thanks again!! Then Jim Pantas brought over the Jim Beam and it got alot more interesting for a few people. :lol: 
Originally Posted by michaelmosty
Damn, had to come back and thank Donovan for the pictures and being our "man in the trenches" saving me time of finding stuff out. The drama around Lindsay's car was pretty crazy and I finally just decided to ignore it.
ops: 
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