The COBB Tuning Motorsports team was back on track at Autobahn Country Club, in Joliet Illinois for round 5 of the Redline Time Attack this weekend, and it proved to be an exciting and death-defying event. The facility was top notch, the track was fast and technical and the fans were great. It was our closest and most exciting win to date, with two competitors closer to our lap times than anyone all season.

I knew the weekend was going to be a whirl wind. Two-day events are already pretty packed, but add to that the fact that no one had been to this track before, it made for a lot of work. Saturday the car did not roll out of the trailer fast at all, we were almost 3-seconds off our final pace. We had made a rear toe adjustment prior to this event that was not ideal for the track, and we had to re-balance our aero with the change to an Aeromotions wing. Both tasks are not especially hard by themselves, but doing this in only 3 dry sessions while trying to learn the track at the same time proved challenging. As expected, the COBB Motorsports crew performed flawlessly and we were able to make great improvements all day, and ended the day on top of the standings.

Sunday was very exciting. We were not sure how much more Ryan Gates had left in his EVO X, we were not sure of how many dry sessions we would get, and to make things a little more exciting I knocked the toe out pretty bad on my first lap in the first timed session. I knew the car had a low 1:27 in it if not a 1:26 with ideal conditions, but I had to settle for a 1:28.1 I was able to put down during the Record Assault session. It was still good enough to win, however, as Ryan Gates was only able to make a few hot laps and pulled off. We had another session left to run and we knew both our GT-R and Ryan’s EVO could go faster. With our toe fixed and me as calm and concentrated as I could be, I waited for the second and final timed session to start. Just as we rolled out of pre grid and into the hot pits the sky opened up. A wet track meant no one was going to go faster in this session. The rain did not let up for most of the afternoon and the organizers scrubbed the remaining timed sessions giving us the win.

The super session was, well… interesting. I am sure it was exciting for the fans the way NASCAR is with lots of carnage and piles of money down the drain. With Willow Springs just around the corner I did not have the luxury of punting my way to the win in the Super Session. I stayed out of the mayhem, and made sure COBB Motorsports still had a GT-R to bring to the next event. It looked like I was going to be able to pull down 2nd overall in the super session until the GT-R decided to through me another one of its trademarked “electronic curve balls” and shut off FWD in the wet. All the wheel spin had ticked off the ECU to the point that I thought something was wrong; however, the ECU had simply disabled the AWD system. This made life exciting and I had to let the Turn-in concepts STI past me.

I was a little disappointed at first with not winning the super session, and not taking the overall event win (we only missed beating all the Super MOD cars as well by .4 seconds), but then I smacked myself across the face when I thought about all the wrecked cars from the weekend. The EVO that almost planted itself in my rear bumper in the Super Session, the three cars that spun in oil and hit each other, the Mazda 5 that ended the weekend high-centered on Armco outside of turn-3. After considering all that, a track record, a win, and a car in one piece was good enough for me.