It’s been a week. Last Monday afternoon after squeezing in 6 hours at the shop, we flew to Pocono, PA for a Tuesday-Wednesday test. Testing is not very exciting, and Pocono is one of the longest laps of the year. The data system had it’s moments of protest (we think it came straight from MWR without any tlc) but it was successful for the most part.
Since we had to be in Richmond, VA on Thursday for the weekend, we had decided to drive to NYC for Wednesday night for a bit of a break. I’m not sure if break is an accurate description of what happened, but it was definitely a change of pace. We stayed close to Times Square, which was convenient for getting into and out of NYC. We went to a Mexican place for dinner that some of the guys had been to before (Mexican in NYC?? I thought that too) and it was good. Then we sort of pub crawled, I think we ended up at 4 or 5 places in total. McSorley’s was a highlight, a pub that seemed to be exactly as it was a hundred years ago. The walls were covered with old new papers. They only served 2 types of beer, light and dark, and both were good. And Blake got yelled at by a bar tender for being on his phone when he walked on.
And then we got up and drove to Richmond, which was about 6 hours (damn DC traffic). Fairly uneventful, though we did drive a not so sleek machine across the Jersey state line…
This past weekend was a bit of a struggle I would say. We finished 9th today, which is about what we deserved. It would have been nice to finish better, but after the last few weeks it feels like a victory just to finish where we deserved to finish. We qualified 22nd, which was probably about 10 positions below what we deserved. Well I say qualified, the session was actually rained out on Friday afternoon, so the lineup was set by practice from Friday morning. We got a little better Saturday in practice, I would say we were a 5th-8th place car. So we were targeting a top 10 today, and we got it. Job done I guess.
All of the JGR cars finished ahead of us, which is encouraging. We will get there, just need a little more time. We head to Talladega on Thursday, which will be a crap shoot. We ran well at Daytona which was the only restrictor plate race we’ve had so far, hopefully having actually teammates will pay dividends again.
But that’s getting way ahead of myself. I get my own bed tonight. Sadly no trivia this week (Jeremy…??) but softball Tuesday night will be a fun distraction. And Wednesday I have to go apartment hunting….ugh
Plutoe Engineering 
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