Friday Qualifying

Earlier tonight we had the qualifying session in the dark.

For a 25 hour race your starting position isn't really important of course because most cars will travel 1500 to 2000 miles and starting positions are only a few dozen feet apart. However this bit of wisdom was lost on many in the field and it was a bit of a gong show with cars spinning off and dropping wheels all over the place. There was a lot of dirt in the air and all over the track for the first few laps.

Carlos did a great job and qualified the car with one of our best lap times so far. We will line up in 43rd place in the 63 car field. Not bad for a car that was salvaged from a flood and is using a stock BMW motor while almost everyone else is running race engines. We're hoping our less-stressed motor will reward us with better reliability and allow us to beat others by doing more laps.

The lights worked pretty well, which was nice because we hadn't tried them before. We have two of them and they're angled outwards in a cross-eyed fashion to give us a view of the apex as we're approaching. They're cross-eyed so the beam is slightly wider on the other side of the car than if it were shining on its own side...little things you otherwise wouldn't think of!

Racing in the dark takes a little getting used to but isn't that bad. The hardest thing is judging how far behind other cars are and whether they're going to try diving inside you. All you see are headlights and it's difficult to tell what sort of car it is which would give you a clue as to how far apart the headlights should be.