Notes

Touring 3 – Podium Quotes

Bret Spaude, First Place

We worked all year and had some problems at the beginning with the car, figured out the problems, raced the car, and had a good feeling coming into here. Practice was good, the whole week just turned out to be really good, and it feels great to do something that not many people get to do on their first try (Spaude is a Runoffs rookie).

The start was crazy. (Fandozzi) got out pretty far, and everything just funneled down real quick. Nobody was really giving much room, it was really just a squeeze fest in the first turn or two. I was behind him a second or two for the first five or six laps. I could tell his tires were going away a little bit towards the end, the track kind of got a little loose on us, and I could tell just in certain braking areas that I was just a little bit better. That’s where I took my jabs and they ended up finishing down on the other side of the track.

Kevin Fandozzi, Second Place

The cars are so similar (Fandozzi and Spaude’s Cobalts), so it helps. You know what the car is capable of. He had the same concern that I have, you have to get on the straights fast. (Spaude) put enough pressure on me in the right places to stop me from doing it. He put five laps of hard pressure on me and it forced me to do things that my tires didn’t want to do. Generally you want to run as clean laps as you can to get back, but he did a couple of things to do that gave me some reason to slow up, which is the right thing to do, and by then I knew that my tires were used up.

Bob Boileau, Third Place

I made a tire choice to be there at the end of the race for these guys. I knew they were going to be wicked fast out of the shoot, so I put a hard set of tires on one side of the car and they didn’t come in as quick as I thought they’d come in. I was trying to keep the car up front so, yeah, I definitely had a couple of hair-raising moments out there. Fortunately, I had enough tire at the mid-point of the race that I could get good exit speed onto the straightaways. I used that to my advantage, and planned on continuing that until the end. I was coming up on these guys hard, but I just needed a few more laps.