So on to the bad news: I had the "unfortune" of seeing the beautiful RENNtech Mercedes *smash* into the wall of the backstraight at Heartland Park. The beginning of the day there was still a bit of rain coming down, and consequently, the track was *super* slippery, especially the long as it uses the dragstrip there for most of the way. The first ten cars or so were able to make it through that turn and that straight without incident, until the RENNtech tried to get the power turn too early, got the car sideways, and wasn't able to catch it in time. I heard the tires screeching he broke the car loose, watched him get perpendicular to the track, and about one second later, hit the wall face on at about 50mph or so. Fortunately the driver walked right out of the car after the accident, and appears to be fine. The car, however, is completely totaled, and there's certainly no one that one can make an insurance claim for this one! That's almost $200,000 that smashed into that wall, and seems to have been just what (most) people needed to be convinced to take it easy there.

In other news - it appears that two or three of the Mallett Vettes are in the lead, and the Raptor and Diablo are right up there too. In addition, there's an ultra-fast White Mustang who's running in the top 10, and the Lancer Evo 5 is also a top runner! I'm interested to see how our Eclipse times compare with his now that we have the car working perfectly again. We'll have the results for you tomorrow morning, or they might possibly be on the official One Lap site right now.

I grabbed a copy of the results from the T&S crew for Michigan Speedway, and those should be up tonight. Based on starting position today, it looks like we finished about in the low 30s with the Seven (because of the problems we had with the car that cost us enormous amounts of time), and the Eclipse got really nailed from having run with no turbo at all - somewhere in the 90s, and 18th in class! :( The Seven still managed a 6th in class though, only four seconds behind the third place car (good enough for the Trophies!), and about 12 seconds altogether behind the super fast #7 Porsche who won last year. We'll try our best to narrow the gap, but obviously, it's only going to be possible on tracks that tend to favor handling cars to horsepower cars.

For those wondering, we got a good 2 hours of sleep last night at a little Econo Lodge about 1.5 hours from Heartland Park. We had to drive through an enormous thunderstorm, in which I was thoroughly drenched. Oh well, "c'est la vie".. So far we've done a little over 950 miles of the journey, so we still have a long way to go.

Time to catch some sleep while on the way to Pikes Peak. I hope to meet Hal and Terees from Club DSM there (and hopefully he'll be bringing along some nice 103 octane race gas for us!), and I also owe a "hi" to Ari, Kellie, Ian, Chad and Jessica. Chad - *everyone* loves your carbon fiber work, expect a lot of calls after the One Lap! :)

P.S. I also met a fellow DSMer last night at a gas stop in.. Indiana I think it was, by the name of Scott I think. So, "hi" to Scott too, and my apologies we couldn't talk more, obviously we're very much on the go!

- Emmanuel