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Grand Am
SHANK: Tough Weekend At Barber
Between not enough sponsorship to run the #23 and the bad luck we keep having with the #60 we could use a bit of luck here…
Michael Shank  |  Posted April 14, 2011  
Michael Shank Racing fielded only a single entry in last weekend's Porsche 250 at Barber Motorsports Park. (Photo: John Dagys)
This is a tough SPEED.com column to write, for the first time in seven complete seasons of Rolex Series racing, we were not able to secure the funding to compete with two cars for the weekend. This is tragic in so many ways. The #23 car was only 3 points out of P2 in the championship but still, she had to stay at home....A real sign of the times.

We had done some testing at Barber at the end of September last year and thought we had a pretty good car coming into the race. As it turned out, the car was pretty good right off the trailer and we concentrated on getting John as much seat time as possible and fine tuning the car.

As everyone knows now after Homestead, tire management is a huge part of our series. We had a good game plan for this weekend. We did not do as good a job as we should have at Homestead and it cost us. We would not repeat that!

In qualifying John improved his time by 1/2 second over practice and would start the race P8. I have to say that John is really coming into his own in this series.

Gone are hobby drivers. Everyone in this series can drive, and drive well. His stints at Daytona, Homestead and Barber are getting stronger by the weekend. All the go karting and coaching by Ozz is really paying off now. My prediction is that John will qualify the car in the top 6 at some point this year which would be huge for us, we'll see...

John had a good start and held P8 the whole time. This is really saying a lot, because at about the 8 lap mark the throttle pedal starting hanging about 20 percent open making the car VERY hard to drive. He radioed us the problem but there was really nothing we could do about it at that point.

A full course yellow came and we put Ozz in the car, we went green for about 2 laps and then it yellow again. Ozz immediately called in and said he is not sure how John drove the car at all. We decided to bring the car in under yellow and try to fix it. We did get a fix on the car but it did not last but two laps. Worse yet we went down a lap in the meantime…

Ozz adapted as best he could and fought a good fight trying to get our lap back. We actually did get the lap back with 1/2 hour to go but the track position was horrible and the best we could do is P6 at the end on the lead lap.

This has been a very trying year so far. Between not enough sponsorship to run the #23 and the bad luck we keep having with the #60 we could use a bit of luck here…The whole team is doing a great job and I hope can get the result they deserve very quickly!

Off to test at VIR, and then race there about month from now....

Thanks for following..

Mike Shank is team owner of Michael Shank Racing, one of the premier Daytona Prototype teams in the GRAND-AM Rolex Sports Car Series. Learn more about Shank and his team at http://www.michaelshankracing.com
The opinions reflected herein are solely those of the above commentator and are not necessarily those of SPEED.com, FOX, NewsCorp, or SPEED
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