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GRAND-AM
IN THE COCKPIT: Jeff Segal, Mid-Ohio & Road America
The month of June is always a busy one for anyone in the racing industry, and with the relentless GRAND-AM schedule of early summer races I knew this year would be no different...
Jeff Segal and Emil Assentato picked up their third Rolex Sports Car Series GT victory of the season last weekend at Road America. (Photo: John Dagys)
The month of June is always a busy one for anyone in the racing industry, and with the relentless GRAND-AM Rolex Sports Car Series schedule of early summer races I knew this year would be no different.
What I hadn’t necessarily counted on was that this year I would spend 25 of the 30 days of June at race tracks across North America, and that I wouldn’t get to go home to Miami for well over a month. No matter, I’m all smiles as we approach the end of this grueling run, as there is no place I’d rather be than at the race track—especially when the results are great like they’ve been!
To kick off the month I headed north from our last race at Detroit’s Belle Isle Park to Le Circuit Mont-Tremblant in Quebec, Canada, the North American home of Ferrari’s famed Corso Pilota and the Ferrari Driving Experience. For the past several years I have been fortunate enough to serve as a driving instructor for this program, and I thoroughly enjoy my time interacting with so many enthusiastic Ferrari owners and driving the newest Ferrari products, particularly around a gem of a race track like Circuit Mont-Tremblant.
While teaching clients how to explore the limits of a 458 Italia street car is certainly a far cry from frantic wheel-to-wheel racing in our 458 Italia GT Grand Am, the shriek of a Ferrari V8 motor reaching maximum RPMs behind your head is a blissful experience, whether it is your first day ever at the track or you’ve been doing it for years. With that in mind, spending my ‘free time’ at the Ferrari Driving Experience is more like trackside therapy than work, and a few days at Mont-Tremblant had me re-energized and ready to head to Mid-Ohio.
The circuit at Mid-Ohio always seems to produce really close racing, and there is something about the layout that seems to equalize all of the different cars and make the racing really unpredictable. Through practice the Rolex Series GT-class times were extraordinarily close, and our Ferrari’s performance had us feeling cautiously optimistic heading into the race, though we were aware that it was going to be a hard-fought race no matter what.
While I was prepared for a tough day of racing, I was not necessarily prepared to watch helplessly from the pits as our car got knocked off the track by a Daytona Prototype in an early race passing maneuver gone-wrong, but after a few anxious moments I watched my co-driver Emil rejoin the track and my heart resumed beating…
I mentioned in one of my earlier articles that success in racing requires a lot of good luck, and at Mid-Ohio boy were we lucky that our car emerged from that incident mostly unscathed! We battled back through the rest of the race and actually managed to get ourselves onto the podium and within sniffing distance of the win thanks to a late-race caution period and some good strategy.
Leaving Mid-Ohio with a second place finish also helped us build our points lead just a bit more which was a welcome bonus as we move into the second half of the season.
From Mid-Ohio we had a week off from racing, although that didn’t translate to a week away from race tracks! I caught an early morning flight from Ohio to make it back to Montreal in time for the Formula One Canadian Grand Prix, and then hustled north to Mont-Tremblant for a few more days of the Ferrari Driving Experience before catching another flight to Wisconsin to test for the Rolex Series race at Road America.
Heading into Road America I wasn’t sure what to expect from our car as the long straights seemed poised to favor the top speed of the BMWs and Porsches, while the heavy braking zones would play to the strengths of our Ferrari. Testing showed that the GT field was again incredibly tightly bunched, but we knew that the two-hour race format was likely to through a few strategy curveballs.
As expected, a full-course caution early in the race played our hand in strategy as we brought Emil into the pits to top off the fuel tanks while almost everyone else in GT stayed out. We lost a lot of track position with the call, but the upside was that we would be able to get to the end on just one more stop while all of the other cars would have to stop twice.
In the end, this fantastic strategy call by the AIM Autosport engineers would prove to be decisive and we took the victory at Road America despite not having nearly the outright pace of some of the other cars behind us. Now we’ll look to close the month of June with another strong finish at the upcoming Sahlen’s Six Hours of The Glen—it has been a long month for all of us but with the way things have been going, I’m not sure I’m ready for it to be over!
~Jeff
Follow Jeff Segal at www.jeffreysegal.com and the Jeff Segal Fan Page on Facebook.
What I hadn’t necessarily counted on was that this year I would spend 25 of the 30 days of June at race tracks across North America, and that I wouldn’t get to go home to Miami for well over a month. No matter, I’m all smiles as we approach the end of this grueling run, as there is no place I’d rather be than at the race track—especially when the results are great like they’ve been!
To kick off the month I headed north from our last race at Detroit’s Belle Isle Park to Le Circuit Mont-Tremblant in Quebec, Canada, the North American home of Ferrari’s famed Corso Pilota and the Ferrari Driving Experience. For the past several years I have been fortunate enough to serve as a driving instructor for this program, and I thoroughly enjoy my time interacting with so many enthusiastic Ferrari owners and driving the newest Ferrari products, particularly around a gem of a race track like Circuit Mont-Tremblant.
While teaching clients how to explore the limits of a 458 Italia street car is certainly a far cry from frantic wheel-to-wheel racing in our 458 Italia GT Grand Am, the shriek of a Ferrari V8 motor reaching maximum RPMs behind your head is a blissful experience, whether it is your first day ever at the track or you’ve been doing it for years. With that in mind, spending my ‘free time’ at the Ferrari Driving Experience is more like trackside therapy than work, and a few days at Mont-Tremblant had me re-energized and ready to head to Mid-Ohio.
The circuit at Mid-Ohio always seems to produce really close racing, and there is something about the layout that seems to equalize all of the different cars and make the racing really unpredictable. Through practice the Rolex Series GT-class times were extraordinarily close, and our Ferrari’s performance had us feeling cautiously optimistic heading into the race, though we were aware that it was going to be a hard-fought race no matter what.
While I was prepared for a tough day of racing, I was not necessarily prepared to watch helplessly from the pits as our car got knocked off the track by a Daytona Prototype in an early race passing maneuver gone-wrong, but after a few anxious moments I watched my co-driver Emil rejoin the track and my heart resumed beating…
I mentioned in one of my earlier articles that success in racing requires a lot of good luck, and at Mid-Ohio boy were we lucky that our car emerged from that incident mostly unscathed! We battled back through the rest of the race and actually managed to get ourselves onto the podium and within sniffing distance of the win thanks to a late-race caution period and some good strategy.
Leaving Mid-Ohio with a second place finish also helped us build our points lead just a bit more which was a welcome bonus as we move into the second half of the season.
From Mid-Ohio we had a week off from racing, although that didn’t translate to a week away from race tracks! I caught an early morning flight from Ohio to make it back to Montreal in time for the Formula One Canadian Grand Prix, and then hustled north to Mont-Tremblant for a few more days of the Ferrari Driving Experience before catching another flight to Wisconsin to test for the Rolex Series race at Road America.
Heading into Road America I wasn’t sure what to expect from our car as the long straights seemed poised to favor the top speed of the BMWs and Porsches, while the heavy braking zones would play to the strengths of our Ferrari. Testing showed that the GT field was again incredibly tightly bunched, but we knew that the two-hour race format was likely to through a few strategy curveballs.
As expected, a full-course caution early in the race played our hand in strategy as we brought Emil into the pits to top off the fuel tanks while almost everyone else in GT stayed out. We lost a lot of track position with the call, but the upside was that we would be able to get to the end on just one more stop while all of the other cars would have to stop twice.
In the end, this fantastic strategy call by the AIM Autosport engineers would prove to be decisive and we took the victory at Road America despite not having nearly the outright pace of some of the other cars behind us. Now we’ll look to close the month of June with another strong finish at the upcoming Sahlen’s Six Hours of The Glen—it has been a long month for all of us but with the way things have been going, I’m not sure I’m ready for it to be over!
~Jeff
Follow Jeff Segal at www.jeffreysegal.com and the Jeff Segal Fan Page on Facebook.
Road Atlanta
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