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Grand Am
DEMPSEY: VIR Race Blog
As actor/racer Patrick Dempsey shares, "Well, we had high hopes going into today's race, but those were dashed pretty quickly!"
Patrick Dempsey  | http://www.mazdamotorsports.com/  |  Posted April 24, 2010   Danville, VA
Dempsey and co-driver Joe Foster did their best on Saturday to overcome mechanical difficulties during the Bosch Engineering 250. (Marshall Pruett)
Well, we had high hopes going into today's race, but those were dashed pretty quickly! With the thousands of parts that make up a racing car, it takes just one problem with one component to ruin your chances, and that's what we encountered today in the Bosch Engineering 250 at VIR.

We fixed the main issue we had prior to the race -- our team resolved the brake problems that we thought we had during qualifying but we had a sway bar break early on in the race. We also had a problem with the brakes locking up, so we also battled with that throughout the entire race. When a sway bar breaks, the handling falls off very fast and turning the car becomes a problem.
Sometimes racing delivers its fair share of frustration. (LAT)

It’s unfortunate. When you’re trying to stick with everybody as much as possible and hold our position to make up some space. But I still managed to come into the pits on the lead lap and hand over to my co-driver Joe Foster. However, he struggled with all of those things after that.

We’re a bit frustrated with a 12th place finish, but that’s part of racing. It’s so competitive in the series that any little mistake will cost you dearly. You can only control everything you can and then there’s things that are out of your control that you have nothing to do with.

You can't always control your own destiny in this sport and you’re often at the mercy of a lot of other people. It’s key to do your own thing, hang in there and that’s all you can really hope for. You do what you can do and see what happens throughout the course of the event.
If the on-track results were hard to come by, the off-track support was tremendous at VIR. (Marshall Pruett)

I haven’t been to VIR since 2007 and the facility and the crowd seemed so much bigger. They are really making progress here on a lot of fronts and these are some very dedicated and great fans. They really know sports car racing too, and you can tell even by the t-shirts they wear that they support not only Mazda and Dempsey Racing but so many other sports car teams too. I must have signed over 200 autographs in today’s session and all of the people were fantastic.

The progress here at VIR is kind of like GRAND-AM in total. They are really building as a sport and the progress is noticeable. The racing is great too and the competition was really tough today and always is. We push our Mazda RX-8 GT all of the time and you have to in this series. This was my first time racing the GT car at VIR and despite our little frustrations, it was a blast. I can’t wait to come back.

Thanks for reading this weekend!

~Patrick

The opinions reflected herein are solely those of the above commentator and are not necessarily those of SPEEDtv.com, SPEED, FOX, or NewsCorp.

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Patrick Dempsey

Dempsey Racing

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