The 25 hours of Thunderhill, I mean where do you start, it's the longest race in North
America, it's 25 hours of straight racing, obviously you have multiple drivers but the
car stays the same, the car is the one that gets to go out there for the entire 25 hours
of the race.
It's the ultimate test of man and machine, it's the proving ground for R&D for new parts
development, you get participation from the biggest auto manufacturers like Audi and Porsche.
For us, you know the 25 hours is the most important race of our season, we spend all
year preparing for this race, every single time we work on the car, it's in preparation
for the 25, nothing else.
It's just the most gratifying feeling, if you can make it all the way till sunrise,
all the way to the end of the race, there's just nothing in the world like it, it's hard
really to explain unless you can just be there and experience it for yourself.
We're out here at the 25 hours of Thunder Hill, getting ready for a long week of racing,
we got here on Wednesday, Thursday we got rained out, today's Friday we're getting ready
to do practice, tonight we're going to qualify, that's one thing that's unique about this
race, we actually do night qualifying, so that'll get real exciting, doing everything
we can to make the car as reliable as possible, tomorrow we get after it.
So right now we're dealing with some sound issues for the car, this particular race they
make us fall in line with a certain amount of decibel reading, unfortunately this morning
we've been over the entire practice session so we've been trying to make modifications
to fix our sound issue, if you're over sound you forfeit that time or you have to come
in during the race to fix it, so it's something that everybody battles with here, we're battling
with it now unfortunately, but we're working through it, we'll get it sorted before qualifying
and we'll be ready for the race.
Alright, so we just got out of the car after qualifying here at the 25 hours of Thunder
Hill, like this race goes every year, there's a tremendous amount of cars on track, it's
the first time all of us get to see the track at night each year, so it's pretty much mayhem
and pandemonium, unfortunately we weren't able to get a clean lap without traffic, we
only got to about 2 seconds of where we were running lap time wise during the day, good
news though is that the car itself is race ready, the car is fast, it's handling well,
it's easy to drive, it's mechanically sound, everything is doing exactly what it needs
to do, the other good news about running at the 25 hour is the race is so long that the
qualifying results don't matter as much as they do in a normal shorter race, so we're
excited for tomorrow, we're happy with where we're at and we're ready to get this thing
going.
Saturday morning here at 25 hours of Thunder Hill, getting ready to start the race here
at 11am, this race is interesting because we use about 7 sets of tires, we go through
about 400 gallons worth of fuel, so it's a lot of up and over the wall, had qualifying
last night, qualified 22nd out of 65, not too bad, car has a lot more pace in it than
what we showed during qualifying, but you know survival of the fittest in this race
is going to take a while to get through it, sort the pack out, we should see weather about
2am, it's going to be off and on rain all the way till the end, so that's going to make
things really exciting, but we're ready for it, got some fresh Achilles ready for the
car and we're set to go.
So you have to know, it's always going to involve a little bit of luck to get so many
cars out on the same track for that amount of time and not have anything happen, not
be involved in a wreck, not be taken out by a driver who's out there exhausted and just
making mistakes, all you can do is prepare the best way possible.
So that's it for today's video, I hope you enjoyed it, I'll see you in the next one.
Thanks for watching, I hope you enjoyed it, I'll see you in the next one, peace out.
Alright, so here we are, middle of the night at the 25 hours of Thunder Hill, I don't even
know what time it is anymore, real late, we've been out there for a long time, we're well
past the halfway mark, car's working phenomenally, weather, not so much, it keeps bouncing back
and forth between damp and dry, so it went down on the rains, it was raining pretty hard
at first, we just cracked into the top 10 overall from what I understand, so hopefully
we can at least hold that, if not keep gaining those positions, see where we're at when the
sun comes up and just keep plugging those laps in.
We're dealing with weather, it's coming in, it's going, I'm getting ready to go out for
a double stint, we're going to take a gamble, we're going to go on some slicks here, we're
sitting tenth right now overall, which is fantastic, we're a couple laps behind the
next car, but right now car's working great, just fighting the weather.
When the rain came, our car was even better compared to the rest of the competition, we
were just completely destroying everybody out there, it was working out really well
for us and we were climbing the ranks, we had one of the best lighting systems out there
which helped us tremendously, it was like driving a dusk, it just didn't slow us down
at all, which was a huge advantage and something that we took a long time to prepare and plan
for after learning from that last year.
This year we had a very competitive car looking for a solid top 10 overall finish, I like
it is every year with this race, it's a lot of luck and a lot of preparation.
We pushed through the night and unfortunately about 19 hours in, almost 20 hours in, we
finally had a failure on the car that took us out of the race and you know that's just
how it goes, you spend all week working at trying to develop the car to get to this point
and the reality is it can be over the stamp of a finger and that's where it's real depressing,
you don't see these things coming and it makes it real difficult for everybody to handle
for a little bit, there's so much that goes into this race and there's so much passion
and everybody's fighting to the end and all you want to do is see that sun come up and
then fight for it in the last few hours and we got right there, sun was starting to come
up and unfortunately the car just couldn't take it anymore so we've learned some lessons
this time around just as we do every other time and next year we're going to come back
stronger, better, faster, we've got some new things in the works that are going to help
us in the long run and I think next year there's no doubt we'll be competing for an overall
win and if not a class win.
