Rick Stauffer joins Jim Roberts' Team

Rick Stauffer, of Ephrata, Pa. and a long time member of the Lancaster County Corvette Club has joined with Jim Roberts on his team to participate in this year's One Lap of America. Jim will be doing the competitive driving this year and Rick will help as a transit driver, sharing the highway miles that will total close to 5,000 miles in this years event. The actual event is about 3400 miles plus the miles out and back to South Bend, Indiana and the track miles add up to that total. The 2011 One Lap of America will cover a large part of the eastern United States. You can scroll down the page to see a map and the tracks we will visit on a previous post.

Now that our team is complete, we need to get on with the details of preparing for this major endurance event. It is very important that the car be checked over very carefully since any type of breakdown would really hamper a good finish. We do not trailer from track to track, the car must be driven the entire distance, and most days we will put on between 500 and 600 miles.

The picture above was taken while the #22 was on display at the Corvettes at Carlise in August of 2010.

Shakedown Run to Rolex 24 Hour at Daytona

I just got back from our "road trip" to the Rolex 24 Hour race in Daytona which we also used to give the car a shakedown run to be sure everything was working well. Had a great trip except for the start. Wednesday morning when we left the weather didn't co-operate and I woke up to snow already on the ground, instead of the wintry mix that wasn't supposed to start until we were well south of here. After a failed start I returned home and changed tires with my other Corvette. These were all season high performance, wrong sizes but close enough and a lot more grip in snow covered conditions. Five miles or so south of York and it turned to all rain, if we would have only left a little sooner.

The race was great to watch and the Corvette ran well. We averaged about 21 mpg and about the only adjustment needed to the car will be to refine the tune a little as it was running rich until it warmed up. The weather in Florida was a whole lot better than at last years race when we were freezing and with a brisk wind. This year Saturday was in the high 60's and Sunday got up to the low 70's. Probably should have stayed down for another couple of months because when we returned we came home to temperatures in the 20's and another wintry mix.