Paulie's Blog: Iowa event caps exciting weekend

Now that the spring semester of my freshman year at Duke University has finished, I can focus on a great deal of other things -- and most of these items are racing related! This week, I spent three days at Michigan International Raceway with the Duke University Motorsports team. I flew right from Michigan to Iowa for the Long John Silver's 200 at Iowa Speedway, where both the Camping World East and West Series ran together. Both events were very successful, as the Duke team finished 11th, its highest ever, and we finished fifth in Iowa.

The Duke University Motorsports team, along with teams from most colleges with engineering programs in the country, competed with their Formula SAE (Society of Automotive Engineers) car. For the competition, teams are to build an open wheel car from scratch. The objective is to have the fastest, most cost efficient, and safest car. As part of the competition, cars are judged off track for things like overall cost and design, and on the track in acceleration, skidpad, autocross, and endurance events.

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My involvement with the team started when I first visited Duke. I was still a high school senior and two of the team's captains spent some time with me talking about Duke. They were a big part of my decision to attend the university and I began helping out the team where I could before I began as a student there. With all that is going on with my studies and NASCAR racing, I haven't had the time to be with the team every weekend, which is primarily when they engineer and design the car. However, I allowed them to use my AiM Sports MXL Data Acquisition System. This system allows the team to log data on exactly what the car is doing at every section of the race track. It saves data like air/fuel mixture, RPM, lap time, brake pressure, throttle position and more.

The team designed a beautiful car and took it to competition. I drove the car in both the acceleration (essentially a drag race) and skid pad (a Figure-8 shaped track) events. Unfortunately, I had to fly to Iowa and could not stay for the last day and a half of the event, which is when autocross and endurance events were held. The Duke team finished with an overall score that placed it 11th, which is amazing considering how new the team is!

From Detroit, I flew into Iowa, landing just a few minutes before my Bill McAnally Racing crew. We all met up in the airport and jumped in the rental car. Upon arriving at the hotel, crew chief Duane Knorr and I spent about two hours looking through data from his tests at Iowa in previous years to try to get a head start. We were going to be using the same car we did in Phoenix with a setup much like the one we left Arizona with.

On Saturday morning we had a lot of time between when the gates opened and the first round of practice. The guys got the car through inspection and I went to work building a few shocks, in order to have some shock options during practice. At 4:10 in the afternoon, I finished up with the shock stuff, put my suit on, and climbed into the race car.

As soon as practice began, it was apparent that we were fighting many of the same issues that we had in Phoenix. The car was relatively stable, maybe just a bit loose, on entry, then would get to the bottom well only to become tight (understeer) in the center of the corner. Duane and the crew worked hard during practice and we made a few gains, but we still weren't where we needed to be. We ended up 18th out of 37 cars. The garages closed an hour after practice ended, not leaving us much time to make changes. Duane, car chief Ryan Precher and I stayed to watch the late model race that night. I was particularly interested in seeing whether or not the groove moved up as the race moved on. We left the track after watching the late models, grabbed some quick dinner and went back to the hotel. Duane and I spent about 45 minutes discussing what the day's changes had done to the car. From there, we spent another hour and a half discussing what direction we wanted to go in and what changes we would make. (Continued)