From Miller Motorsports Park, Utah

- A summary of the fourth round of the 2010 America Le Mans Series season.

Salt Lake City is famous for its lake, formerly known as Lake Bonneville, who was created 30.000 years ago during an ice age and which slowly receded to its current size. The lake has the particularity of not having any run offs, and that’s why the small amount of salts brought by its tributaries is concentrating as evaporation happens. A truly interesting and unique natural phenomenon.

Miller Motorsports Park takes full advantage of the vast amount of space in Utah by offering one of the largest motorsports venues in the country. This modern facility is only 25 miles from Salt Lake City and offers the drivers breathtaking views of the nearby mountains as they navigate the long and complex layout of the full course configuration. With 22 turns and over 4 miles, it is a challenging track to learn quickly. American Le Mans Series prefers to run a configuration called The Outer Loop, which makes the track a bit shorter (3.048 miles) with only 13 turns but creates a very fast combination of a 5th gear kink called Witchcraft followed by 3 rapid esses called 1st, 2nd and Bad attitude that you negotiate in 3rd gear. The track offers very little elevation changes and has plenty of runoff areas, enticing the drivers to take chances in all the fast corners.

This was our first visit to Miller and we were curious to see how the more than 5000 feet ASL would affect engine and driver performance. The dry heat and abundant dust would make the race quite demanding and the additional stress of the relatively high altitude would favor drivers with solid fitness conditioning.

We only knew this track from driving it on the simulator and were anxious to see if that preparation would allow us to be on pace like it had been the case in Long Beach. After the long hiatus in the series caused by the 24 hours of Le Mans, we were concerned by our lack of seat time and the challenge of being able to get back in the groove on an unknown track with many very fast corners.

The Friday test sessions took place in 95 degrees weather, but the dry heat was bearable and a thunderstorm breaking over the track right at the beginning of the first session reminded us how unpredictable weather can be in mountainous areas. We quickly established a good baseline, but were fighting a lack of rear grip that was putting us about a second a lap off the fastest cars, many of which had benefited from a promoters test day on Tuesday that our business schedule didn’t allow for us join.

Saturday testing started under beautiful skies and a milder temperature of 82 degrees. We had made changes to the car that moved it in the right direction but not enough to completely close the gap with the front runners. We managed to improve our times by a full two seconds and became very competitive as a non-pro driver but Andy Lally was still off by almost a second a lap, unusual territory for him. And despite more suspension adjustment work, we were unable to improve setup enough by the afternoon qualifying session and were only granted a fifth grid position. This was disappointing and the team went back to the drawing board to understand what the problem was. It was going to be a long night of work on the car...

Sunday morning started with the usual American Le Mans Series driver autograph session. A large crowd had come to the track as American Le Mans Series is the main racing event of the year. With the changes made late into the night to the rear suspension, we felt ready for the fight ahead and after a quick lunch in the paddock with our guests, we got prepared for the race as we would start the car.

The green flag was dropped at 2.30 pm and the race took an orderly start. Turn 1 is very fast given the length of the front straight but everyone managed to go through it without too much drama. Soon after, a car went off, missing the brake zone in Turn 5, and we immediately took advantage of it to move to P4. 5 laps later, a collision between two cars in Turn 6 put us in P3 as we managed to steer around the incident that took place right in front of us. The first full course yellow regrouped the field, and when the track went green again, we started chasing down the two cars in front, trading fast laps of the race and closing on
them a couple of tenths of a second a lap.

With the gap to the front car at less than 2 seconds and closing, we missed a shift in Turn 12 and spun the car, fortunately with no consequences and we promptly went back onto the chase. The next double yellow took place in the driver change window and we were happy to hand over the car to Andy in P3 and
in good shape. The various pit strategies brought Andy to P2 and then to P1 and he led the race for over an hour. Upon pitting for fuel, a small delay from Andy in shutting off the engine inflicted us a stop and go penalty and put us back in P4. With about 30 minutes left, Andy regained P3 and brought the car home safely, being too far off the leaders to attempt to better our result. The later disqualification of the car in front of use for technical irregularity ultimately put us in P2.

This second podium was very satisfying given the issues we faced in setting up the car, the stop and go penalty and my lack of seat time in the last month. We once again demonstrated that we can finish in the Top 3 and made great progress in the championship points where we are now 2nd as a team and 2nd as individual drivers.

As usual, we have many people to thank for this racing weekend. Our sponsor partners: Freescale Semiconductors, Future Electronics, Green Hills Software, Hitachi Global Storage. The Racer’s Group, our racing team partner, who executed once again absolutely flawless pit stops, probably even more motivated than ever by their new outfits and helmets displaying well our sponsor partners. And our codriver Andy Lally, from whom we are learning a lot every weekend we get to race together.

Lastly, our gratitude goes to our guests and friends who were cheering us from the grandstands. Please visit the completely redesigned team web site at WWW.SILICONTECHRACING.COM and sign up for automatic updates.

See you in Lime Rock in a couple of weeks!