Pakistan Express Racing Team

For those of us with long memories, doesn’t Bruno sound like his uncle?

All weekend, live timing and scoring is available at http://www.drivenasa.com/liveresults/

Finally, on Sunday, live web coverage of the 2008 NASA Championships is available at the official site at www.Speedcasttv.com

We had a brilliant practice session, with our own rain meister, Faisal, totally dominating the session by being 3.5 seconds faster than the second place car. Qualifying was a bit of a fiasco, however. The pregrid was a mess and, despite lining up for qualifying in 6th position, the race director and grid chief had no control over the situation. As a result, a few cars got caught out and we forced to start the session from the back of the grid. A handful of cars managed to get clean laps, while we were mired in a bunch of slow cars. Needless to say, we did not get a clean lap and ended up with 7th spot on the grid.

The good news is that our garagemate, GBMS, rolled around the course with speed good enough for 4th on the grid. Follow live timing and scoring later this afternoon via the link below.

We are getting no Mazda love today. Our tire engineer again prepped a set of tires for us to throw down some fast times. Our last lap was a flyer, but, yet again, our momentum got sucked up into the Mazda vortex of speed-sucking.

Have a look for yourself:

OK, what is it with Miatas and their obvious dislike for our sweet lil 786 race car?

Our tire engineer, Jay McHeatgun, prepped us a set of freshy Hoosier R6s for our second session today. The prepped tires were good to go from the get go, so we took that advantage and hauled butt right out of the proverbial pit-out gate.

On our way through, a bunch of Miatas entered the track and one rocket scientist, as you’ll see, had perhaps the wrong idea.

Enjoy this clip and a great example of the brain trust that makes up the Spec Miata class:

We just finished our first practice session on day 1 of the NASA National Championships. We thought we should show you what our new camera system looks like.

This clip illustrates one of the quicker laps of our scrub session. Enjoy!

Since the last race, we’ve been hard at work repairing and preparing 786.

Here we have the new front bumper cover, painted in the correct Championship White:

Our good friend, Matt “Tinman” Johnston, has been the main man behind all of our repairs and prep.¬† We’d planned to remove the Stiffler Bar and replace it with a cross brace across the back of the cage, but were preempted by the distruction and rebuild of GBMS’ 187 Neon, now in fresh periwinkle colour.

Here are two shots of Matt’s brilliant cage work:

If we’re not careful, Matt’s going to develop a reputation as the go-to cage builder east of the Mississippi!

I’m glad the Grand Am guys were the guinea pigs at the brand new New Jersey Motorsport Park before we had to race there.

In pre-race practice, Scott Pruett destroyed his Riley Daytona Prototype and comments from nearly every source indicate there was far too much dust on the track.

Check out the lead photo in this blog post from our friends at Compass 360 Racing here