Nobody saw it coming.
After the first session, Tyler McQuarrie in the CWest / Brian Crower S2000 had a 1.5 second lead over his closest competition, Gary Sheehan in the GST Motorsports Impreza. Tyler finished first in the first session with a time of 1:41.621 and Gary followed closely with a 1:43.196. Chasing them both closely was Tanner Foust in the Crawford Performance STI with a 1:43.864. Later, Tyler seemed to struggle a bit during the Live Sockets Circuit battle and Gary beat Tyler in both laps, turning times of 1:43.049 compared to Tyler’s 1:44.533.
As the final Unlimited Class session was about to start, Tyler quickly pulled out of the grid, and back into the garage, telling the Redline staff that the car might catch fire. Tyler was obviously comfortable with his lead, and called it a day.
Gary took advantage.
Obviously, the team at GST Motorsports had a plan in place. Get some good rubber on there, crank up the boost and go to town! Well, it worked. In his first lap in the second session, Gary set a blazing laptime of 1:38.395 to win the overall championship for the fourth round of the 2008 Redline Time Attack. At first, the Redline staff was so amazed, that the first call was to race control to verify Gary hadn’t inadvertantly cut a corner. But to leave no doubt in anyone’s mind, Gary backed up the lap with a 1:40.962 on the second lap and a 1:40.914 on the third.
Congratulations to Gary and the team at GST Motorsports!
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Wow, some sandbagging strategy going on there? Congrats to GST.
Well, not sandbagging in the traditional sense. Mike likes to ensure that we have good power for the times sessions, so he gradually gives me more revs and power throughout the weekend. It’s a bit of a battle between us, because he wants to protect the motor for when it counts, but I want practice at the power we’re going to compete at so that I can establish all my reference points.
But throughout the weekend I’m driving at the limit of the car I have and we are constantly making adjustments to bring the balance of the car to where I want.
We made some drastic changes to the car for that final session and they paid off. Were we doing something sneaky to deliberately mislead our competition? No. Did we stick to our strategy to ensure that we had a healthy car for the last session to go for it all? Yes.
What a great weekend for GST Motorsports! Those guys work very hard on that car and they deserve it!
Gary
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