2010 is going to be a very different season than the previous years. This year will be the first year I will not be racing in the Speed World Challenge Touring Car series. The team I race for, BimmerWorld Racing, has decided that we need to change our direction and go to a different series. This year we will be racing in the ST class of the Continental Tire Sports Car Challenge, the old Koni Challenge series. In this new series I will have a co-driver as the races are 2.5 hours long or more. My co-driver all season long will be Bill Heumann who is the defending I-Prepared champion in the BMWCCA Club Racing series. Bill and I will be racing in the #81 2009 BMW E90 328i. We will be traveling to Daytona on Friday to start the first official test days in the new car.
This switch to a new series and a new car is going to add some excitement to my racing year. The CTSCC championship is going to be a tough one to come out on top of. This year there are going to be several teams with some of the best drivers in the world racing against Bill and I. With just the test day entry list posted this week there are drivers like Andy Lally, Nic Jonsson, Ryan Eversley, Lawon Aschenbach, my teammate James Clay and that is just to name a few. I like the idea of racing against these guys as it will help to bring out the best drivers in the BimmerWorld team. There is nothing like going against the best and finishing on top. The cars I am racing against will be similar to the ones I raced against before but add to it Honda Civic SIs, Volkswagon GTIs, BMW 328s, MazdaSpeed 3s, Kia Fortes, Volkswagon Jettas. Having a teammate that I get to share the car with is going to make this year a lot different. Luckily Bill and I have worked together in the past so we know how each other drives. The biggest challenge is us finding a setup that will work for each of out driving styles. With these races being 2.5 hours long the setup we find will need to be something both of us can be fast driving. We both will know more after this weekends test days. What I am the most excited about is learning more about the strategies of endurance racing and some of the new racecraft that I will need to use as a driver. With World Challenge being a sprint series with a driver driving as hard as he can for 50 minutes, CTSCC will be a lot different. There won’t be as much trading paint. And the race at the end will really be who saves their tires the best. There is a lot of strategy for the team too. When does the crew tell the driver to come in for a pitstop, how much fuel do we add, do we do a 4 tire change or 2 tire change, etc. And then the results can rely on how well the crew executes the pitstop. Do they get all of this along with a driver change completed in 70 seconds, 60 seconds, 30 seconds?
2010 will be a new racing year for me and the team. We are all going to be learning a lot this year along with being more involved in the racing than each of us have been in the past. Bill and I are both excited about this new step in our racing careers. Stay tuned as I update you all on how the test days and the start of the season go this weekend.
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