by Donna Gilio

Greetings to all,

Donna Gilio & Sons

Well, it was a super fun event at the 2007 ARRC- American Road Race of Champions….

I will first preface it with saying that earlier last week it was looking like we were not going to make it at all: We rented Tom Lepper’s hauler to tow our cars out to Atlanta and had this lined up all the back in May or June. Chuck called Tom Lepper and Tom preceeded to tell him that the truck had been wrecked and it is now not available to drive back to Atlanta!!

So at the last minute we convinced Jason from Bulldog Motorsports if he would haul out the 3 cars (Branden Alexson, Jim Devenport and ours) to Atlanta. A very big thank you To Jason and his beautiful wife Courtney for stepping up to the plate and making the long trek to  ARRC to make it happen for all of us.

Chuck and I leave on Wednesday and arrive at the track that evening and what a sight to behold: the paddock was absolutely filled to the brim with racers eagerly awaiting to test their mettle against one another to crown the 2007 ARRC Champion. The energy was electric and everyone couldn’t wait to put their car on the track. Test and tune was the next day on Thursday and every group was sold out. There were over 90 cars for Group D and it was a mad house. No one could get a clean lap in and there must have been 10 completely destroyed cars before the weekend of racing even began!! I felt bad for them, but, hey, we all have had sh*t happen to us at one time or another! They offered the FE class a 15 minute session of their own at 5:30 for a fee, and Brandon was able to buy this slot, so he went out and laid down a ripping fast lap of 1:26.00 flat on the 3^rd lap! Way to go Brandon. The guy is just bloody fast, ok!!

Friday it is Practice and the car seems to be working good. We made no changes to the car. We disconnected the Transponder so no one would know what kind of times we were running but other teams were on pit wall timing us anyway. Word was leaking out that our car was fast!

Poor Brandon, his bad luck continued. The 1^st qualifying was Friday afternoon and Brandon’s bad luck continued. He blew up his motor. Enterprises happened to have a spare so Dan and Brandon spent the rest of Friday night and Saturday swapping motors. I qualified 5^th fastest out Of 39 FE cars. I was happy with that.

Sunday morning, we had another chance at qualifying better. I chose to throw away my times from Friday’s qualifying and take the gamble for a better time on Sunday morning qualifying session.

We made some changes to the car and put on fresh sticker tires, hoping to put it on the pole. Well, everyone else went fast too and so did I but it dropped me back to 8^th place and on the 4^th row for Sunday’s race. Brandon qualified 3^rd and Jim Devenport qualified 20^th. This is Jim’s first year racing and he is doing great!

The race starts Sunday afternoon as the FE class is the feature race for ARRC. The start got waived off because the front row was not lined up good and there was also a crash in the back of the pack after it was waived off!! So we went full course yellow for 3 laps, then it finally went green. I got a great start moving to the outside where a hole was and moved up from 8^th to 5^th by turn 1. I dropped back 1 position  and stayed in 6^th place for 7 laps defending off a whole pack of cars!! By having to drive defensively, this cost me time and the front pack pulled a little away from us. On lap 8, I made a small error which cost me 6 seconds and several positions. So, I put my head down and drove patiently through the pack from 13^th place to a 5th place finish.

I was bummed that I made a mistake in 7 which cost me a better finishing position in the race, but, that is racing and I had a really fun race anyway.

Brandon on the other hand, had more bad luck. He did not get a good start and on lap 7 or 8, he was taken out by Jeff Kester from Texas. It tore the left rear corner off of his car. Sorry to see this happen to Brandon. He is the ARRC Champion from 2006 and he is fast. Jim Devenport had a fun race too. He went across the finish line in 20^th place and bettered his time.

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