Cindi Lux
Time to come up for air....
The past six weeks has been a non-stop adventure in the road racing world. Huge fun, but crazy. The Mopar Viper has been going non-stop with either on track testing, personal appearances, wind tunnel testing and so many other activities. I knew coming into the Motor City for the Belle Isle race over Labor Day would be huge, but I had no clue on how big it would turn out to be.
Coming off the Canada race at Mosport our crew only had a few days to prep the Mopar Viper and get it ready for a physical street race. And they did an amazing job. As they were putting the final touches on the car at our Livonia shop, I was off doing all sorts of press appearances for Mopar. Running around from radio interviews to TV appearances to signing autographs at Chrysler World Headquarters to visiting the Viper Production facility in Conner to talking to more than 800 Viper owners and guest at the VOI.10 celebration going on at the same time in Detroit. It was a whirlwind tour and was fun as hell. And then in-between all of this … I had to crawl into my hotrod World Challenge race car and go tear up the race track.
From a driver's point of view, the Belle Isle street course is super rough and bumpy. I have driven only two street courses over the years, Long Beach and St. Petersburg in Florida. And both of these tracks were crystal smooth compared to this place. But my race engineer Matt Bejnarowicz gave me a killer hotrod to drive and it handled the bumps extremely well.
I started the race in 13th and ended up finishing eighth. Our fourth top 10 finish of the year. However, we did manage to collect two special awards in this race as well—the Hard Charger Award for the driver who advances the most positions in the race and the Hole Shot Award. Now this Hole Shot Award is huge for me personally because I have really struggled at our standing starts. As most of you know, we do not do "rolling starts" at the beginning of our races; we do a standing start on the front straight away. We are the only sports car series in North America that has this crowd pleasing element. I was just about to call my Mopar drag race brothers to get some tips on getting a better launch. But the drag racing gods must have been looking out for me because I NAILED the start at Belle Isle. It felt awesome.
So I am sitting here on a flight heading back to Portland, Ore., for five days to spend a little time at home. Just enough time to clean my driver's suit and repack my bags and head off to New Jersey for our next race. We only have two more races on our schedule this year.
We will keep everybody posted. Thanks for tuning in and if anybody has any questions you would like to me answer on this blog, just drop me a note through my website, http://www.cindilux.com.
