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Thing Motorsports/True Line Wheel Alignment race report.

Frank Thing started the race with his daughter Marsha as his navigator. On that, our only un-interupted lap, he ran a  47:03, within 8 seconds of the race's eventual fast lap time. He was driving it like he stole it.  At the start of the second lap, he stopped to let Chris Sabin take over as co-drive, plus about 25 gals of 112  race gas. With the stop, that lap was still a 49:55.

At the start of lap 3 , I took over as driver with Andrew Smithson as my co-hack. All was well until about RM 20 when Andrew advised me that our battery voltage was reading low. We shut down engine cooling fans and one set of lights. I radio'ed  our pits, letting them know the situation. By the time I pulled into our pits, all lights had gone out and the engine was sputtering from lack of voltage (down to around nine by then). We drove for a while with no lights.  Frank and Brice Faulwetter (totalimmortal) dove in and located the problem, a broken hot wire at the alternator. The repair and battery re-charge took 15 minutes. Every-one in our pits dug in on that pit stop.
We re-started and ran the final lap without incident.

I want to apologize to Chris Greeley #1494. I almost put him on his top on lap three. We were following close, just getting ready to give him a tap when he slowed, going into a drop off. We got under his truck, and it seemed like we lifted his rear wheels three feet off the ground and rotated him about 90 degrees before getting un-tangled. Totally unintentional. Whew.
I spoke with him on Sunday, and he seemed OK, but I wanted to say something publicly.

After the race, I left the start/finish believing that we had won class one (our first) and also overalled first. Later we went back to the S/F to find out that we had lost out on the overall by fifteen seconds.
That's racing, so they say. The rest of our evening was a "fifteen second" chant that  went on until we went to bed.

Congrats to Dan, Fish and thier crew. They won it fair and square.  I said in another forum that I feel like the pitcher who gave up the record setting home run to Mark Mc'Guire.

Thanks to Frank, Veva, Brice, Marsha, Karen, Justin, Josh, Chris, Andrew and my son Jeff. Also to Brett King and his shock tuning advise. We were able to take 10 minutes off our last lap times on that course.

The win was bitter sweet, but it was still a win, and we'll take it.

And no lost spares this time.

We still have the class one points lead.

Fifteen Seconds

Tony Cortes

#158 TT