In addition to the added length of this race, there was also some increased pressure as Will and I were going for the Driver's Championship as well as the Team Championship. If our competition, the #27 Fenton Acura won the race, we needed to finish second place to ensure both Championships.

As part of Will and I's day jobs as Marketing Director and Content Director of TheRaceSite.com, the source for on line sports car racing news, we had a side trip at the beginning of last week to Las Vegas for the SEMA show. We left Vegas on Wednesday night at 11:00 PM to fly to Daytona. We got in at 9:00 AM and had our first practice session less than two hours after our plane landed. It made for a full day.

Thursday ended up being a day of playing with a few different spring setups and getting some sleep after the red eye in the night before. We found the set up we liked and in the afternoon session we were able to turn some fast laps and were confident that we had a car that could fight for the win.

The Friday practice sessions came and we found several of the other cars to be extremely fast. The Focus, Cavilier, and Proteges all were much faster than us on a horsepower track. Given that our car weighs more than any of the other cars, one would think our car would be the car with the most horsepower, but such was not the case this weekend. We realized that for this race our car was not going to win on outright speed, but we were still confident that we had a good game plan in place despite the quick times turned in by the other cars.

Saturday morning we qualified for the race. For the first time in my career I missed a shift and found first gear instead of third. The missed shift couldn't have come at much more of a worse time as there was only four hours between the qualifying session and the race. The crew quickly went to work on diagnosing the engine, and after thirty minutes they decided to do a motor and transmission swap. Mike Thomas, Vince Harrington, and Trevor Whipple rapidly pulled a motor and put another one in the car with thirty minutes to spare before the race started. All the while Butch Monette, Troy Miller, Bill Hesson, Matt Brogan, and the rest of the crew prepped the other two Integras for the race and set the pits up.

When the race started the entire team had very little idea of what to expect out of the #41 King Motorsports Integra. An engine change in four hours leaves a lot of room for error, and with a six hour race for the Championship, we had very little room for a problem. Amazingly, the car ran perfect for my entire first stint. We started from the back of the grid, but by the time I had given the car over to Will, we had moved up to third in class.

Will went out and for the next two and a half hours pounded on the car to get it up past the #19 Mazda and the #27 Fenton car to take the lead. After Will's brilliant driving got us the lead, it was Bill Pate's cagey veteran pit strategy that really won us the race. Bill, using his twenty years of professional street stock endurance racing experience, made the right pit calls for when to stop Will and when I got back in the car we had almost a lap lead on 27.

I knew making it to the end of the race was all that mattered for the Championship now. I wanted the win pretty bad, but more than that the Championship meant everything to me. I went about saving fuel, tires, and the drivetrain and hoping that we would last for another two hours of racing.

Bob Beede in the #27 was using his car up as much as he could as he chased me. He was turning in some great laps catching me by a second or more a lap. When he fina