Located in the Berkshires, Lime Rock Park is a beautiful but remote area. There wasn’t too much in the area except for cute little towns. The track is relatively short but fun. This was the biggest crowd I’ve race in front of to date as it coincided with the TransAm Memorial Day event. People were camped out everywhere!
There was no early practice day for this one but fortunately most everyone was new to this track as FRP had not held an event there in the last decade. In the practice session before qualifying, I had the 10th fastest time of the 25 participants. In qualifying I also ended up P10 but the top 15 were all within a second of the fastest lap. Its a relatively short track as the lap times were running 53-54 seconds for the top 15 in qualifying.
In Race 1, I started P10 and had a good few opening laps, moving up to 6th by lap 6. I dropped back down to 11th on lap 8 before working my way back up to 9th by the finish. Video of the Race courtesy of SpeedTour TV is below. I’m in the #80 yellow car.
Based on fasted lap in Race 1, I again started in P10 for Race 2. This was a challenging race and positions changed often. I jumped up to ninth on the start before a yellow flag came out. On the restart I lost the position and then another before dropping to 14th by lap 8. An accident on lap 9 brought out the safety car and required several laps to clean up before restarting with 4 laps to go. The second restart went a little better as I was able to gain a position before picking up a couple more by the end of the race to finish 11th.
The upside of an otherwise average race was that I was finally able to get a good fast lap after the second restart. The time put me in P6 but a chassis change by the driver on pole moved me up to start P5. I got a great start and was in third for several laps when the yellow came out on lap 7. On the restart I dropped a couple of spots back to 5th and then was in an all out battle for the rest of the race. There was a 3-way battle between 5th through 7th. In the end, 5th and 6th were able to pull a small gap to 7th and it was a drag race to the finish line. It was literally a photo finish for 5th place with 0.009 seconds separating the two. Photo below courtesy of Formula Race Promotions.
