This was only our second race this year to be televised; it was recorded and will be aired next weekend on Speed Channel. So, we were hoping to do well and get some good exposure like we did at Daytona. Our car rolled off the trailer with an ok setup on it, and I spent most of the first day figuring out the nuances of the track, because I have never been there. The Miller Motorsports track is the longest in the US at 4.5 miles and 24 turns. Most of the tracks we go to are around 2 to 2.5 miles with 10 or so turns. So, needless to say Miller takes a little while to get used to. With 2 practice sessions the first day I did all of the first one and most of the second one (my co-driver has driven there a few times). I was comfortable with the track after the first session, but after looking back at my video and data I was able to be right on pace in the second session.

On day two we had one practice session to get the car setup really dialed in before qualifying, then only one more practice the next day before the race. So, when we went out for our all important setup practice session my car had a brake line fail on the first lap. It took too long to fix and we missed the entire session. Now we had to just guess on the setup for qualifying, and hope to get a good race setup in the next day morning warm-up.

Aaron went out to qualify and was able to hustle the car to a 4th place starting spot, but the handling was not great. The car was quick for a few laps, but he was really beating up the front tires in order to get the necessary speed out of the car. We knew that the car wouldn’t be strong over a long green flag run, because of the abuse the front tires were seeing. So for the last practice we tried some different stuff and learned a little, but we went in a different direction than we should have. It didn’t really help us out that much.

As we made decisions about the race, we decided we would have to go back to our qualifying setup, but we could gamble on making some changes to it with what we learned with our final practice setup, which was very different from the qualifying setup. I wanted to go with the gamble, because we had nothing to loose; but, as we all talked it over we made up our mind to just go with the qualifying setup and see how it would be on a long run.