This was never planned to be anything but the 4th report in a string of maybe 7 or 8 Westfield Insurance blurbagrams through till the end of the race at 3:30 EST.  This is about the time Colin Braun would have handed me the reins for a second stint, but all this was not to be.

Ford discovered a fatal ignition timing defect in the 6 car, as mentioned earlier, which terminated their race in a heartbeat, plus Racey Krohn's 76 entry too.  The 61 car, Tracey's 75 car, our 60 Ford Riley and the SunTrust 10 car have been balancing on a tightrope waiting to see who would fail next.  Turns out it was our turn this time, as fate would have it.  Oswaldo picked up the car after my first stint, restarting outside the top 10 and managed to end up running P3 and eventually P2 in a car not set up to canter with the quickest horses in this long race.  Ryan then took his next double stint to the wall, not literally, holding onto a top four spot after getting squeezed going into the bus stop, bailing intelligently to a stop on the straightaway before re-entering Nascar 3 from a dead stop.  Almost always costs a spot or two, but doesn't end up with the car spinning into the wall or crashing out of the race.

Around 12:30 a.m. Ryan reported the car going dead, no engine firing at all, without warning, in the middle of the bus stop.  The car was flat-bedded back to the garage and after 15 minutes of diagnostic work, Ford's John Maddox declared the patient dead.  At that stage there's not much more to do except thank all the hard working crewmen, the drivers (and Beccy), clean out your lockers and hope no one notices the tear on your cheek.

In no uncertain terms, the Porsche engines now have the run of this series, not just for endurance races, but in our sprint races of less than 3 hours; boredom will set in fairly early if Grand Am chooses not to modify the 6 and the 8 cylinder versions that are now running loose among the lesser machines in the DP class.  As Elena, Luke (with hair dyed neon orange to match the 60 car) and I left the track and looked back one last time at the tall red lit leader board, only 4 DP cars remained on the lead lap.  About half the numbers were GT cars too.

As we look back on what could have been, Mike Shank, renowned as a reliable granite-like mechanical team when it comes to race prep, found himself with a defective Ford part that we could do nothing about.  Who knows which driver may have bungled a corner or a pass and ruined the race, but as this race began to mature, it certainly had a feeling of one if not two MSR cars standing on the podium in 2009.

Not to be.  Sorry we won't be there when the sun comes up and you switch on your SPEED TV channels.