So the weekend is done, the car is put away until I catch up on work and the honey do list. So we rolled off the trailer ready to roll and nothing worked. We left with it as perfect as possible, literally off the dyno into the trailer, rolled out and just wouldn’t run. So Monday we ran the test and I spun off and tore apart the splitter, the dam thing took 2 weeks to build. And the car ran super rich. Hello Tom help, so he started his diagnosis and magic. By tues new new, newly repaired splitter. Ran a little better but missing at high rpm now. Ok new tune and new tires, ran a little better but have yet to get back to mid August times. Still frustrating, Wednesday back out and starting to see some important improvements. Tom and I have been on the phone for hours discussing what is going on. Ok Thursday last shot for qualifying in one 20 min session. I have 40 or so true sports cars and us. Well Tom took a big swing at the final tune and it worked, ran a 2:15.2 car felt good and if I could of had a little cleaner run but it was what we got.
Fri at 1:00 pm was race time. We rolled of 21st out of 36. We had a great rolling start and picked up two positions by turn 3, grabbed another and then gave back 2. 40 mins at vir is a workout. We ran almost every lap as a new personal best, Toms last tune for race day moved the redline up to 7800 rpm and it was needed. Motor ran strong, never slowed up and pulled to redline every time. Tom didn’t pull his hair out, I did, he didn’t shoot the car, I wanted to. Tom never lost focus and I certainly came close. He did everything to this build and we ran great, had a memory building race that caused a few folks to come over and really wonder what in the world did we bring to the largest end of the year event. Well we brought a 05 zx3 focus with 2.0 liter duratec. We weight more, present a bigger aero issue, and really took an economy car and kick better than half of the best STL field in the nation. It was my bucket list to earn an invite to the runoffs, done, qualify, done, race and be top 15, done. Thank you to my crew, my Visa card, and Tom. You built a great motor that fought back until we figured it out and then 40 min of redline performance.