Tire problem
Saturday, May 13th, 2006
The afternoon session at Putnam was not good. We took a 22nd place and dropped in the standings. The left rear tire started coming apart during the last lap of the session. The car pitched broadside to the track at 80mph, but Joel gathered it up after some havy on-throttle tail wagging to the cheers and clapping of the other competitors. With the tread delaminating under him, he couldn’t maintain traction so we lost a lot of ground and points. After the event, the top team in our class (with twice our horsepower) gave us their spare. Their wheel didn’t fit our car, but their tire was identical to ours. We limped 8 miles to a garage at 20mph where we got their tire mounted on our wheel. We got out of the area late and started making up time on the highway in the pouring rain.