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The two weekends leading up to the
2005 Factory Five Nationals at VIR had been mixed. We won at
VIR and then were poor at
Road Atlanta so we weren't
exactly sure how we would do against some of the top talent in the country.
Thursday and Friday practice wasn't encouraging as we chased down either a fuel
or electrical problem. Once again, it was Harry bailing the out Team Elam
as he sorted through everything as Dan went after parts. The results
seemed to pay off for Saturday's exhibition race as Dan was one of the fastest
cars on the track. At one point, the official results showed him in third
place, but inspectors found an illegal spring in the engine - resulting in our
first ever disqualification. The spring didn't give us a competitive
advantage, but it was still illegal so it meant a late night and early morning
rework of the engine. Somehow, our talented engine-builder Mike Morris
once again pulled off the impossible and completed the changes to the engine
with minutes left in the qualifying session. Eighth place in qualifying
wasn't where we wanted to be, but it was a lot better than starting last and we
felt we'd be ok once the race got started. We felt even better about our
performance when we found that we'd lost the rear brakes. The downside was
that we'd spent out time correcting the spring problem and not looking over the
car or getting it better tuned.
That is exactly what we did: Dan worked out a start plan and timed it to get the run up the middle to move up to the leaders. But Dan quickly faded as the car lost power and then overheated. After just a few short laps, it was Dan back in the paddock as Team Elam watched the end of the race in street clothes.
Our run at these Factory Five Nationals hasn't been strong and it marked the third year in a row that we didn't even finish the race. We showed flashes of speed and recovered from adversity, but we just couldn't quite pull it off. After so much hard work we really wanted a strong finish. This was hard.