Well, it’s the last race of the year this weekend at Homestead. Unfortunately, we’re not in the position that we were hoping for in the championship race. We took a lead into Montreal two races ago, but for whatever reason, we weren’t able to get the job done and now we need some help to try to defend our championship from last year.
At this point, all we can do is go out and do our best and win this weekend at Homestead. The track is made up of using the Homestead oval along with an infield road course, somewhat similar to Daytona, although it’s much smaller.
One nice thing about Homestead is that it offers more passing opportunities than we’ve had on some of the tracks we’ve run at on the schedule recently. We also won there a year ago, so we’ve had some success, and we’re confident we’ll run well again this weekend.
Some of you may also remember our very first race at Homestead, which is still one of the more memorable races in Grand-Am history for many. That was the race that we were leading late when my teammate at the time, Max Papis, and Jan Magnussen had a fierce fight for the lead in the last few laps, banging each other around the track for about two laps before both ended up going off. It was fun for the fans, but not so much fun for our No. 01 TELMEX Lexus and our Chip Ganassi Racing crew, who had to fix the car afterward.
Back to this week’s race, we enter in third place and we need to finish two spots ahead of the SunTrust team to pass them in the championship race, but after that, it gets much more complicated. To win the title, we’ll need to win the race and then have the No. 99 car finish seventh or lower. They’ve been consistently strong down the stretch here, so most likely they’re going to have to have a problem for us to win the title.
Yet, in this crazy season, I won’t rule out anything. It seems like every time anyone has started to feel comfortable, something wild happens to them. For us, rain has been our demon, but we’ve seen leaders knocked out of races, problems in the pits, you name it. And as competitive as this series has been, you have a lot of hungry drivers and teams who may not be racing for the championship, but are going to be fighting tooth-and-nail for a win to close the season out on. I don’t think many of them are going to be cutting any of us any slack when they’re fighting for a position.
We held the championship lead after six of the 11 races this year, but leading after this race is the only one that really matters. Wish us luck!
