ATLANTICS: Lynx Racing and Buddy Rice had it won at Mid Ohio...but
17 August 1999
Lynx Racing driver Buddy Rice had the KOOL/Toyota Atlantic race at
Mid-Ohio won, handily, by a big margin... until his car ran out of
electricity, that is.
Rice's Lynx teammate, Mike Conte, handicapped by a miserable 17th
place on the qualifying grid, dispatched six of the cars ahead of him with
surgical precision to finish a reasonably satisfying 10th.
It happened this way. After qualifying seventh in preliminary
qualifying on Friday with a car that was just too stiff for the conditions,
Saturday was rained out and Rice had to start well back of where he
belonged.
In the race, displaying the bulldog tenacity that makes him a force to
reckoned with no matter where he qualified, Rice moved up several places on
the first lap, another couple on the second lap, and was the fastest car in
the lead pack of four that was pulling steadily away from the field.
Over the first half of the race he continued to pick off one car
after another until he took the lead on lap 21 of the 30-lap race. From
there his superior speed became apparent and he pulled out a several second
lead on the second place car. With two laps to go, it was - apparently -
all over but the shouting.
Then came the call on the radio, ".... [crackle]... losing power."
The team radioed back to soldier on as best he could, but once the
electricity is gone, the car stops just as surely and quickly as when the
gas tank runs dry. On lap 29 of 30, he pulled to a stop on the front
straight almost directly across from his pit area, his hopes of returning
Lynx to the winner's circle for the first time this season over - until
next weekend at the Target Grand Prix of Chicago, anyway.
A post-race post-mortem conducted via laptop computer and data
download revealed that his alternator, a brand-new one installed just
before the race, had failed on the second lap and Rice ran out of reserve
power in the battery just one lap short of victory.
"The team has consistently been giving me good cars, now we just
need to get our luck turned around," said Rice. "Winning is a funny thing,
sometimes. You can have all the ingredients and come so close, but it
stays just out of reach until finally everything clicks that first time and
you can grab it. After that, it seems to come - not easier, but more
often. We've been there before, and it's only a matter of time until we're
there again."
Twenty minutes after the end of the race, Rice's car was diagnosed and
repaired, and the team and driver were deep in discussion about baseline
setup for the new Chicago oval, a track that will see its first laps run in
anger next weekend.
Mike Conte's day on track was less dramatic, but still showed his
improving form. He started 17th, moved up to 12th within the first few
laps, and then was able to pick off two more cars by the half-way point.
That left him with in 10th with a big gap to the 9th-place car that he
spent the remaining laps chipping away at.
"Apart from having to start so far back, the first half of the race
was very satisfying and the second half was frustrating and lonely," said
Conte. "Once I got up to 10th, the next car was so far gone that there was
no hope of my catching him. I might have pushed harder, but I thought my
right front tire was blistered, so I softened the suspension and drove
conservatively. It turned out, after the race, that it was just rubber
buildup that I could have scraped off by driving harder into a couple of
the left-handers, but that's the sort of thing only experience teaches.
We've done very well on the ovals this season, and I'm looking forward to
trying out the new oval at Chicago next weekend."
The next race on the 12-event KOOL/Toyota Atlantic schedule is he
inaugural running of the Target Grand Prix at the new oval track in Cicero,
Ill. on August 21.