9/28/00

We have a guest author for this evening's report. Cindi had a long day and asked a friend to provide the update since they were together all day.

Today's schedule was very long. Cindi left for the track at 7AM and didn't get back to the motel until 10 PM. This morning was a practice session. All three drivers got in the car and all three are still learning this car. It is quite a step up from the WGGT cars. Cindi is going over 10 seconds a lap faster in the GT car than she turned with the WGGT car. It takes a huge performance increase to reduce lap times by that much. In this morning's practice Cindi did a 1:30, Divina 1:32, and Belinda 1:33. This afternoon was qualifying. The WGGT qualifying was immediately before the GT qualifying. Cindi's co-drivers Belinda and Divina are also running WGGT. They both qualified in the top five where the top five are within 0.3 of a second. Because of the back to back sessions Cindi qualified the GT car. She did three laps with consistent low 1:29's and was very excited when she got out of the car!! The fast GT cars are doing 1:25's. But the race is 10 hours long and finishing is more important than having the fastest lap.

This evening was night practice. The three drivers did two rotations through the car. The order is Cindi, Divina, and Belinda. Cindi and Belinda both turned 1:32's but I missed getting a time for Divina. Cindi is looking for more speed and has been getting valuable input from Darren Law and John Morton in the sister G&W Porsche. The site of glowing brakes on the cars at night is something.

Besides watching Cindi and hopefully getting some good pictures of her sent to our webmaker, I had the opportunity to watch the practice session for the Beetle Cup. The concept is VW took New Beetles, put a V6 in them, put slicks on 'em, and roll cages and suspension. VW brought them over from Europe and have many name drivers in them. Scott Goodyear, Scott Sharp, Hurley Haywood, Brian Redmond, just to name a few. They are pretty fun to watch. But I have to say that Hans Stuck is simply a level above everyone else in this type of car. He is great fun to watch. I'm hoping to see pictures come out in magazines of how he was carrying the rightside tires up in the air when launching the car off the curb in turn 3.

Look for the next report from Cindi tomorrow.

With having such long days at the track it is easy to forget some things.

The G&W Motorsports team is great. There are many people on the crew, I haven't counted how many yet. But everyone goes about their job efficiently. Whether it is changing tires, downloading from the data acquisition system in the car, to even the simple but important job seeing that everyone is fed. They are a great bunch of people. During an interview Thursday Cindi was saying how much confidence she has in them. Getting in a car like this must be intimidating but the team is helpful and very supportive.