Deja vu all over again…again…

Well this weekend seemed like a serious shot of deja vu.  The weekend, qualifying and race, played out the way several did last year.  Car was strong in qualifying, but we had our worst run in round 3.  Car was strong in the race, we lead some, and ran top 3 for most of it, before a late race caution followed by a bad restart resulted in a 7th place finish.  I don’t really have a new way to spin that story I’m afraid.

The pros are that we ran a little better than I’d dared hope.  Coming into this weekend I would have taken a top 10 all day.  That’s what we got, but with laps lead and one of the better cars all day.  Plus we learned a lot about this new for 2016 package, with less downforce and softer tires.

I apologize to anyone who watched today (I heard the race was boring…), that’s not the race we were expecting at all.  I was expecting a caution every 10-20 laps for someone blowing a tire, or spinning out.  I thought we were going to be out of tires by the end of the race, and the strategy was going to be what cautions not to stop on.  I was wrong.  That was a record setting green flag run to start the race, 210 laps.  Part of me is happy about that, there is data I can collect on green flag stops that I can’t on yellow flag stops.

So on to the next one.  We race in Las Vegas next Sunday, this was a really fun weekend last year.  This year it gets worse (or maybe better?) because we will be there testing all day Thursday, so maybe I will get a little more black jack time?  It just means this week is shorter, one less day to prep cars.  Though we have an advantage over the NC based teams, in that Vegas is a much short trip for us.

That’s about all I’ve got.  Anyone got any particular suggestions on what they’d like to read about?  I’d like to write more about my time in Denver, but that’s not really a thing that exists right now.  I will keep you posted.