The SCCA Super Tour season is now over except for the Runoffs, and in our quest for the national points title in SCCA’s Prototype 1 class we’ve had some great wins but also some big disappointments. On the plus side, we’ve scored three wins in Super Tour events and none bigger than winning the June Sprints at Road America on Father’s Day, June 19. More on the Sprints win below. Also, we secured the Western Conference Championship in dominating fashion. This sets us up for a shot at the Triple Crown if we win the Runoffs later this year. The Triple Crown is awarded by the Chicago Region SCCA for winning the June Sprints, a conference championship, and the Runoffs in the same year. If we can accomplish this, it would take some of the sting out of falling short in our quest for the national points title.
As it stands right now, we sit second in the national points title chase to Chip Romer, and even if we win the Runoffs and collect 25 points for first place, it will be almost impossible to overcome the 20 point deficit to Chip unless he has a very poor showing at the Runoffs and scores less than 4 points or has a “did not finish” (DNF) in that event. We had two DNF Super Tour races ourselves and scored no points and that cost us as we had to settle then for two 4th place finishes at the VIR spring races as part of our points total. So we still have a very slim mathematical chance at the national points title. We have shown we can be very fast and win if we can keep Elana running to the end of the race. Her next and final outing this year will be at the Runoffs at VIR in late September/early October. The VIR spring races had minimal green flag racing as multiple crashes by others ruined the event and we never got the chance to race hard as we only had a couple of laps at speed and the rest were behind the pace car.
This year was the 67th running of the June Sprints at Road America. The Sprints was the first event held at Road America when it opened in 1956 and it has been held continuously ever since. It has special meaning for me, as I’m the same age as the track, 67 years old. We won the Saturday race back in 2018 and have had a total of 4 podiums since 2017 but have never won the feature race on Sunday. This weekend started out again with many car issues such as random part failures that caused us to lose a lot of track time. We were in the 2nd starting position after Q1 but dropped to 4th after Q2 when a suspension clevis broke early in the session. In race 1 on Saturday, we failed to take the green flag to start the race as an electrical issue showed up on the pace lap. We were starting to think we just can’t catch a break here.
We started Sunday’s feature race in 4th and quickly moved to 3rd at turn 5 with a bold pass on Todd Slusher under braking. Lee Alexander, last year’s Runoffs winner, was next up. I got a run on him on the back straight and then dove inside under braking into Canada corner where I made the pass but couldn’t make it stick as he powered back around me on the outside. The next time around, I repeated the same move and was able to make it work this time so now I was in 2nd. I gapped Lee and Todd and was staying reasonably in touch with the leader, Chip Romer. Eventually Chip stretched the lead out to about 10 seconds and I was ready to settle for 2nd place when on the last lap, Chip had a brake rotor failure that caused him to go off track, get a flat tire, and then limp the car home for the runner up spot. With all the issues we had, it felt really good to get the win and make up for the disappointment of missing the first race as well as past years’ heartbreaks.
My teammate, Tim Day Jr., swept both races in his Prototype 2 car for the fourth year in a row and on the checkered flag cool down lap we were able to go around the track side-by-side and make a memorable video opportunity, and the big crowd loved it. Click here to see the video.