My guess was exactly the opposite of the result. Lada pwned the F out of caddy. Kudos to the Lada guys for keeping it rolling. I thought for sure that crapcan would permanently break. But I know nothing about Ladas and blindly assumed it's a fragile piece of soviet crap. Apparently not....
Agreed that if people do a good check of their cars for potential failure points (like bad ball joints, wheel bearings, water pumps, etc. etc.,) the whole field can be quite reliable. But that's contrary to the Lemons model- pieces of crap that will likely break and let's see who can hold theirs together for 24 hrs.. It's very true that the key to win is to be quick, but more importantly and stay out on the track as long as possible. Plus you have to pit wisely. Pitting under green kills you. Pit under yellow at all costs.
We probably averaged just under 1:40/lap and finished 29th. That clearly wasn't fast enough. Our car ran like shit (strong fuel injector short/hesitation from idle to 3K rpm) so we only had decent power from 3K to 4.5K rev limiter. We only had 3 signficant delays- two offs that required no repair (but had to pit) which included our only black flag (10 min penalty), and a refueling f-up sent us to our off-track pit area on account of spilling too much gas.
All told, our significant delays and other minor ones probably cost us no less than 40 min. and might be close to 1 hr. That's ALOT of time. If the leader is turning 1:30 on average, that's a loss of between 27 and 40 laps to the leader. Then our foolish driver change strategy cost us more time- nobody drove more than 1.5 hrs and we have 5 drivers.
Still, we were just moving right along turning lap after lap. A fast track like that is going to reward the high power:weight cars (that corner well too) as long as they can keep their noses clean and not overdrive the car. Some cars like the pink mustang had some serious GO at their disposal. But our slow ass E30 still beat that car.
Kevin