Temple of VTEC Rumors and News - Honda of America Racing Team (HART) RSX Results from Phoenix

This past weekend the HART team traveled to Phoenix. The team arrived on Wednesday for a testing day. Car #00 and car #69 were put through their paces throughout the day during the 4 20 minute practice sessions. Car #69 was used just for the testing session. Slight modifications to car #00 were made to get it ready for the official Grand Am Cup practice day on Thursday. Friday morning John Schmitt took car #00 to qualify. John piloted car #00 to a first place qualifying time of 1:10.2. The hard work to get the car dialed in for qualifying paid off. "The car handled excellent in the infield and in the banking," said Schmitt. The setup was checked to make sure that everything was okay before the car entered the grid for the race.

At the start of the Phoenix 200 John slipped to 3rd going into the first turn. A Lexus IS 300 went by as well as a BMW Z4. John was battling with a BMW Z3 that was down a lap. Once John got by the Z3 he started to reel in the Z4. There was a yellow that came out at Lap 49. John came in to hand things over to Pete Halsmer. The team changed the front tires and also added fuel. We came out of the pits in second behind one of the Lexus IS 300's. The following lap the Lexus came in but couldn't catch up to the pace car so they slipped to second, pushing us to first. Pete was running constant times in the low mid 1:12's. He started to build a significant lead. The team was a little concerned that we couldn't make the entire race on the fuel that we had so we made a strategic decision to push hard to build up our gap to the second place Lexus car. A lead of 65 seconds was built up to the second place car. The decision to pit to add some fuel and change the front tires was made so that Pete would have a good car to bring the car home. We came out of the pits with an 8-second lead. The pit stop took a little longer than expected but we were still ahead. Pete started to increase the differential to the second place Lexus towards the end of the race. Pete drove the car home for a first place finish.

Thanks for all of our sponsors for their continued support and Honda for allowing us to go to the race this past weekend. The 1st place trophy will be displayed later this week at the service center.

http://www.grandamerican.com/news/news630.html

TV coverage: The Grand Am Cup race will be aired on the Speed channel May 10th at 12PM.