Quiet day of practice….

Too quiet.

But thats not to say the day went without drama.

FX Motorsports Development has arrived unexpectedly and taken up residence in the garages. Billy Johnson showed us around the newly modified engine bay to see all the “cool” (pardon the pun) new features to help keep the heat where it should be, and prevent it from going where it shouldn’t be. New heat shields were fabricated to shroud the turbo, intercooler and oil cooler. The car looks to be in top form and was running some of the fastest (off the record) times of the day.

For the teams that were ON the record with their times, AMS and Mark Daddio are leading. 1:34.361 was their fastest lap early in the day yesterday when the temperatures were cool (relatively) and some fog lingered in the air. James Elterman is still working on some issues with the Takata STI and a melted speed sensor, but they were the fastest modified car yesterday lapping the nearly 2.3 mile circuit in 1:41.945. Michael Ostby, when not tooling around on his Honda Ruckus was able to squeeze in a couple laps in the Challenge/GTMotoring/Bridgestone RSX to the tune of 1:50.885 late in the day.

At the beginning, we talked about the fact that it was quiet yesterday. And it was. Sure an engine was blown, and another was swapped out (check the Redline PreGrid a little later for details on that) but it was quiet because so many of the regular faces were not here. We knew Crawford Performance wouldn’t be here, and we were excited to see Scott Bush and BC Racing roll in, as with FX Motorsports Development… but there wasn’t any practice from Tony Wiesenhahn, or Douglas Wind. We’ve been assured they’ll be in the paddock on Sunday morning though.

The bigger story may be the record. Its been hard to track down an official track record for production sports cars here. NASA’s records haven’t been updated since April of 2008, and SCCA’s records don’t really seem to have that blistering fast lap that is out there somewhere. We’ve heard from track management that there is a GT Cup Car that is local to the area that has run a 1:33.xxx here, so we’re going to go with that for now. Coincidentally, that same car will be competing today, so it should make for an interesting run.