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American LeMans
FEINBERG: Taking it to the Streets
After a brutal and stupid mishap at St. Pete my boys got the Viper all back together and ready for Long Beach, where we logged our first finish of 2009.
Joel Feinberg  |  Posted April 21, 2009   Fort Lauderdale, Fl
After two races with various problems, Feinberg's Primetime Racing Group came home 7th at Long Beach. (PRG)
After a brutal and stupid mishap at St. Pete my boys got the Viper all back together and ready for Long Beach. However, it wasn’t until the day before the truck needed to leave Florida for CA that we actually booked our tickets.

The commitment to a race like Long Beach for a single car privateer team is a difficult one as it’s a cross country trek, for an hour and forty minute race, at a street venue that has no room for escape, and has the ALMS as a second tier event to the IRL.

The gamble of a decision was made due to the fact that if we finished the race we would score some big points for our underdog program during the ABC Sports network coverage as well as with the 100,000 fans in attendance. The week began as usual: start from scratch and figure out what works for our car at that track, and all within a rushed on-track schedule.

We had two 45 minute sessions on Thursday, one 40 minute session and qualifying on Friday, and our race on Saturday afternoon. The chaos began after my first stint on Thursday with my co-driver, Chris Hall in the car. I had shaken down our pre-race guesstimate in the first 25 minutes and while Chris was in the car making his observations he was the recipient of a “ruin your underwear” tire blowout in the left rear at 147 mph on the front straight. Luckily, his years of coaching other drivers paid off and the skills he actually teaches helped keep the car off the wall.

This resulted in the car sitting in the turn one runoff, on a flatbed, with a wrecked diffuser and a mangled quarter panel for an entire hour while the IRL ran their two-seater Indy experience. Meanwhile the entire crew got an hour long lunch break with nothing to do but watch every other team on pit lane make their adjustments for the next session which followed immediately after the IRL bobsled show.

It wasn’t until the second 45 minute session began that the car was dropped off in the penalty box causing us to implement the “mobile tire change unit” -- and wheel a nitrogen tank we carried down pit lane to get the car off the flat bed. After we pushed the car back a hundred yards to our pit and the rest of the field was given the green flag, the Primetime S.W.A.T team swarmed the car and within 10 minutes and we were back on track.

Struggling to figure out what adjustments needed to be made with the limited track time, it wasn’t until qualifying that the nail was hit on the head. Chris instantly dropped 2 seconds off our practice times and was in P4 when a red flag stopped the session. The green would come back out but Chris’s time wouldn’t hold up in the end as a few tenths separated the majority of the GT class settling us in P8.
Feinberg and co-driver Chris Hall were chased and did a lot of their own chasing in the Long Beach race. (PRG)

Regardless of where we ended up in qualifying, it was apparent that we had figured out what the car needed and we found the lap times we were looking for. The next day was going to be a long one. While most teams stayed in bed for the 7:30am race warm up, we hit the cold track for 15 minutes so I could feel the changes for myself since I would be the one starting the race later that afternoon.

When 4pm finally rolled around and the green flagged dropped I was rockin’ lap after lap with the best times we had run all week. My buddy Lou Gigliotti, (who by the way stopped by to thank me for spelling his name correctly in my last entry, which means he read it and is now part of my fan club) was in front of me again and I had my eyes on reeling him in.

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