Fall Summit Point

Team Elam returned to Summit Point and brought a sense of normalacy: a working car, running in multiple sessions, and a return to the winner's circle. Despite this – or maybe because of it – the final race weekend of the regular season was more than a little strange.

Dan did some testing of one of the Marcus Motorsports Cobras (see him with locked tires in the copper-colored car) while Bobbie ran the pink car with her 944 Cup friends. That left time for Harry to play instructor (and give rides) while Dan went out in small bore to play. The pink RX-7 is probably the least horsepower car on the track, so it took a lot of work to make it go around. Bobbie wasn't really in class, but managed to finish ahead of some much faster cars. She only ran on Satuday. Dan's run on Saturday had him starting at the very back of the field with the only other RX-7 way up in the field and nearly 9 seconds a lap faster in qualifying. (The cars aren't technically in the same class due to their configurations, but it was the best we could get.) Dan managed to get the win thanks to the guy breaking, but it didn't mean a lot of passing. Sunday morning Harry found a brake problem and we picked up more speed on Sunday as Dan had a nice start and cruised to another win against much faster cars. He had a fun time playing with Dave Lyons thanks to a spin (we have pictures courtesy of Cates Engineering, but we can't find them!) and Dave managed to get by Dan with just a lap or two remaining.

We ran the pink car pretty hard. It was nice to get through a weekend with a return to our ways: lots of fun and running around the track and paddock. It was a nice way to end a very difficult regular season and hopefully 2005 will look better for us!

(Most images courtesy of the nice people at www.EuroImage.us)