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GRAND-AM
IN THE COCKPIT: Jeff Segal, New Jersey
On this weekend we were lucky and good, and that’s the key to racing success!..
Emil Assentato and Jeff Segal celebrate victory in New Jersey. (Photo: Brian Cleary/GRAND-AM)
Following the last round of the GRAND-AM Rolex Series at Homestead-Miami Speedway, more than a few people in the paddock had remarked that AIM Autosport Team FXDD owed our maiden race win to good luck more than anything else.
When the full-course caution arrived due to heavy rain and substantial flooding of the race track, our Ferrari 458 was in the right place at the right time. We were leading the GT field behind the safety car—a position we would hold until the checkered flag flew shortly thereafter.
To those who said we were lucky, I’ll say fair enough—we would have had to make another pit stop for fuel if the race had run the full two hour and forty-five minutes instead of the abbreviated length. Perhaps there were a few cars that would have had the fuel for the finish, and you never know what would have happened if the race had continued for even another lap, especially in those conditions. We rolled the dice and stayed out while others pitted, and on that occasion you could rightly say we got lucky.
The phrase ‘better lucky than good’ springs to mind, but I might have to disagree with it. In order to benefit from a bit of luck, you need to do the hard work and put yourself in the right position to begin with.
At Homestead, we had just passed for the lead moments before the yellow flags were waved, and we got to the lead on merit and plenty of hard work—I doubt anyone would dispute that. I would say that in racing the magic combination is to be lucky and good, and that’s exactly what we were at Homestead.
I mention luck in part because of our result at Homestead, but also because the team faced a different kind of luck afterwards at the shop, nearly derailing our race at New Jersey Motorsports Park before it even began.
While loading for the trip to New Jersey, the rear lift-gate of the team’s trailer had a major failure that put our guys in a really difficult position. Unable to get any of the large equipment (including our race car) inside the trailer, they faced a critical time-crunch if they were going to make it to the track in time for the first day of practice.
The guys at the shop thrashed for over 24-hours trying to fix the lift-gate and they finally got it working with just enough time for our truck-driver Kyle to drive like a madman through the night and arrive for GRAND-AM’s rig parking—much too close for comfort, and a reminder that in order to do well in this sport you need everything to go according to plan, not just what you see on the track during the races.
We unloaded at New Jersey Motorsport Park with our crew already exhausted and feeling a bit on the back foot from the trailer drama, but fortunately they were all able to get back to the hotel early on Wednesday and get some sleep before testing began the next afternoon. The guys took some comfort in the fact that my co-driver Emil had done a test day at this race track just about a month ago, and he was able to find a setup that seemed to work really well for this tricky little circuit. A change of pace for our team, then, as this would be the first race weekend that wouldn’t begin with serious question marks regarding our setup.
I hit the track for the first test session to find that the confidence in our setup from Emil’s test was unfounded, as the car was suddenly really a handful to drive. I was struggling to match the times that Emil had turned during his test, and it became pretty clear from these first laps that this weekend was not going to be an easy one. Undeterred, we started making changes and slowly but surely we improved the car and started to pick up the pace. Track conditions had changed dramatically since we had tested, and we needed to adapt.
The more we get to know our Ferrari 458 Italia, the more we are finding that it is an incredibly sensitive car—tiny setup changes yield huge swings of performance, so everything really needs to be millimeter perfect in order to nail the setup. On the one hand its great that the car responds well to any number of different setup changes, but on the flip side, you can really get lost in a hurry if you make some poor setup decisions!
When the full-course caution arrived due to heavy rain and substantial flooding of the race track, our Ferrari 458 was in the right place at the right time. We were leading the GT field behind the safety car—a position we would hold until the checkered flag flew shortly thereafter.
To those who said we were lucky, I’ll say fair enough—we would have had to make another pit stop for fuel if the race had run the full two hour and forty-five minutes instead of the abbreviated length. Perhaps there were a few cars that would have had the fuel for the finish, and you never know what would have happened if the race had continued for even another lap, especially in those conditions. We rolled the dice and stayed out while others pitted, and on that occasion you could rightly say we got lucky.
The phrase ‘better lucky than good’ springs to mind, but I might have to disagree with it. In order to benefit from a bit of luck, you need to do the hard work and put yourself in the right position to begin with.
At Homestead, we had just passed for the lead moments before the yellow flags were waved, and we got to the lead on merit and plenty of hard work—I doubt anyone would dispute that. I would say that in racing the magic combination is to be lucky and good, and that’s exactly what we were at Homestead.
I mention luck in part because of our result at Homestead, but also because the team faced a different kind of luck afterwards at the shop, nearly derailing our race at New Jersey Motorsports Park before it even began.
While loading for the trip to New Jersey, the rear lift-gate of the team’s trailer had a major failure that put our guys in a really difficult position. Unable to get any of the large equipment (including our race car) inside the trailer, they faced a critical time-crunch if they were going to make it to the track in time for the first day of practice.
The guys at the shop thrashed for over 24-hours trying to fix the lift-gate and they finally got it working with just enough time for our truck-driver Kyle to drive like a madman through the night and arrive for GRAND-AM’s rig parking—much too close for comfort, and a reminder that in order to do well in this sport you need everything to go according to plan, not just what you see on the track during the races.
We unloaded at New Jersey Motorsport Park with our crew already exhausted and feeling a bit on the back foot from the trailer drama, but fortunately they were all able to get back to the hotel early on Wednesday and get some sleep before testing began the next afternoon. The guys took some comfort in the fact that my co-driver Emil had done a test day at this race track just about a month ago, and he was able to find a setup that seemed to work really well for this tricky little circuit. A change of pace for our team, then, as this would be the first race weekend that wouldn’t begin with serious question marks regarding our setup.
I hit the track for the first test session to find that the confidence in our setup from Emil’s test was unfounded, as the car was suddenly really a handful to drive. I was struggling to match the times that Emil had turned during his test, and it became pretty clear from these first laps that this weekend was not going to be an easy one. Undeterred, we started making changes and slowly but surely we improved the car and started to pick up the pace. Track conditions had changed dramatically since we had tested, and we needed to adapt.
The more we get to know our Ferrari 458 Italia, the more we are finding that it is an incredibly sensitive car—tiny setup changes yield huge swings of performance, so everything really needs to be millimeter perfect in order to nail the setup. On the one hand its great that the car responds well to any number of different setup changes, but on the flip side, you can really get lost in a hurry if you make some poor setup decisions!
Road Atlanta
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