I was excited about getting back to Road America since it’s one of my favorite tracks on the calendar. It’s such an iconic, historic circuit.
Thursday, the load-in day, was beautiful and I found time in the morning to go for a run around the town of Elkhart Lake with my teammate Joel Miller. We actually ran into a couple of other drivers on the trail we were on! That was a nice start to the day.
Friday was our first day of practice and included about two-thirds of our pre-race track time, and it got washed out with rain. We did do a few laps, but they were really just reconnaissance laps to check some rain items and setup changes in case it also rained for our race on Sunday.
Saturday ended up being dry, so we got our first dry session in. We worked at a feverish pace to get our adjustments and setup changes made for qualifying that afternoon. Even in qualifying, we continued to refine setup changes in preparation for the race the following day.
Sunday’s race started off very busy with lots of traffic in both prototype classes. After the first 30 minutes, an incident allowed us to make a pit stop during a full-course yellow for fuel only. That strategy allowed us to jump most of the field: the team had a phenomenal pit stop so we went back out with great track position.
It was a very different feel for me in that part of the race because it became more of an open track with little traffic ahead of us. Mentally, you have to stay in the game when it’s like that so you continue to push your lap times and focus on consistency.
We had our final pit stop, coming in for service and a driver change – I handed over to Joel. The team made another great stop. The crew really nailed our pit stops, which helped us to come home 7th in class with another clean race.