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Curran Crashed Out of Possible Top Five Finish |
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 - Looking Toward Sanity at Mid-Ohio -
July 26, 2009
Joliet, IL
The seventh race in the SCCA SPEED World Challenge GT series, two weeks from now at the Mid-Ohio Sports Car Course, can’t come quick enough for Eric Curran and his #30 Whelen Engineering Chevrolet Corvette.
“I’ve raced at Mid-Ohio 14 times since 1999, won an SCCA National Championship and two professional races there,” he said. “It is a track I know and love – slow turns, hold-on-tight fast turns, and a 3,000-foot straightaway. You can get racy there and not get in too much trouble.”
Today the two World Challenge classes held their first race at a new track, Autobahn Country Club, near Joliet, IL. The 3.56-mile, 18-turn circuit is, literally, part of a private country club complex, except it is a country club for racers, not golfers.
“I’ll remember Autobahn as a very pretty place, and one where the World Challenge teams were made to feel very welcome by the track’s owners, but not the best racetrack we’ve been too” he said.
 “But I’ll also remember it as where my #30 Whelen Corvette and I were comfortably in sixth place, with a realistic shot at a top five finish, and where I was smacked in the back end by Gunter Schaldach in a slower Dodge Viper on a restart after a three-lap, full-course yellow situation, and got to watch the rest of the race from the sidelines.”
“We tested here at Autobahn a couple months ago, and car owner, Sonny Whelen, Teddy Marsh and his Marsh Engineering crew put solid cars under both Sonny and I. I don’t like seeing our guys having to do major repair work between races, especially when it could have been avoided by the other driver.”
After qualifying seventh quickest, Eric inherited sixth place on the first lap, but the track’s layout allowed the cars to get very spread out.
“By the second lap, even though I was sixth, we were already 8.5 seconds out of the lead. With 18 turns, the straights were pretty short and that made good passing real difficult. Not much after the start the cars got pretty spread out. There really wasn’t much racing going on, more following the leader from a distance until after the double file restart. The rear wheel drive front engine cars really struggled at this track. It wasn’t until 5 cars got taken out that the front engine rear drive cars got towards the front. It’s too bad that the cars are more closely matched. The fast lap times in the race were a good indication of that”
Corvette driver Tony Gaples drove into a tire wall on the fifth lap, bringing out the safety car. Under yellow, the top six cars bunched-up to within 0.522 seconds of each other, a possible recipe for disaster that came to fruition when Curran was abruptly knocked off the track by the Viper as everybody tried to avoid an accident ahead of them involving race leader Tony Rivera, plus Dino Crescentini and Brandon Davis.
“SCCA Pro Racing has tried to do a two-wide restart before, instead of having us in single file to take the green flag,” Eric said. “Responsibility still belongs to the individual drivers, but with six cars a half-second apart, that was a recipe for disaster. And a really narrow, slippery turn one was for sure to cause contact.
“SCCA should have known after the Touring car race that a double file restart into that turn one was trouble for sure. Well, I guess they got what they wanted -- a mix up of cars at the expense of others. This was a really bad idea. I honestly blame SCCA more than Gunter. This could have been avoided and they had plenty of notice. The next restart was single file and a sure indication that they had made a big mistake.”
 On the positive side, Eric is looking forward to Mid-Ohio and single file restarts in a few weeks.
“So this past weekend we dropped one spot in the Driver Championship points, to sixth. Unfortunate, but anyhow, we’re now off to Mid-Ohio,” he concluded. “On the positive side, Sonny Whelen started 16th in our #31 Corvette and finished 11th. That holds him at eighth in points.”
The World Challenge series will again join the Indy Racing League cars, as was the case at Watkins Glen and Long Beach earlier this year.
The SPEED TV broadcast of the Autobahn race will be Tuesday, Aug. 18 at 2pm ET.
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