BARTONE: Road America Downs and Ups

The majority of our SRO America racing season has been spent testing. We did four days of testing at Road America prior to our race weekend. This gives me a great sense of the car, the track, and the different conditions that can be faced during a race weekend.

With maximum track time under our belt, we went into the weekend with high hopes.

In our Fanatec GT World Challenge America powered by AWS group my teammate, Adam Christodoulou, posted the fast lap in practice two, so we felt good about our effort with the great support of RealTime Racing. As you know, when the green flag drops anything can happen.

In the GT America powered by AWS races I had a sixth and a fourth-place finish. The Bartone Bros Racing Mercedes-AMG GT3 was under me the whole time and the front group was pretty spread out for the 40-minute races. One of the things I am focusing on is putting a complete race together, or race craft.

With the experience of multi-time sports car champion Andy Pilgrim in my corner, to go along with the winningest driver in World Challenge history, P.D. Cunningham, that is a pretty good data bank to draw from when planning race strategy.

I have been working on switching my brain from, having to ‘win every time out,’ to sometimes fourth place is all there is on the day.

I think I got the ‘win every time out’ gene from my drag racing dad Tony.

When you lineup in a Top Alcohol Funny Car with one other car next to you covering a quarter mile in 5 seconds, it is easy to have that ‘win every time’ state of mind. When you are competing in endurance sportscar racing with 20+ other cars on the track, you need to take what the car, competition, and conditions give you.

With that said, the highlight of our weekend was a zero to hero effort in Sunday’s Fanatec GT race.

It started tough. Adam had to pit early for a wheel issue. With the long and slow pit lane he returned to the race in last place. The field was strung out around the four-mile Road America circuit so in a 90-minute race it felt like game over.

Well, there was a scary and unfortunate crash involving George Kurtz, thank God he walked away. The second it went yellow, I started to do the math, and I thought it would be a long shot for any kind of a result.

On the last lap, they told me ‘in front of you is P3,’ so I was on his gearbox the whole last lap and I knew I had to make it work somewhere. I was faster in the back section, but I had to pick the right place, so what’s better than in the last corner.

In the previous laps I knew I was faster in that sector of the track. I was able to get a strong exit off Canada Corner and made the run to Turn 14, got inside Derek DeBoer’s Aston Martin, had a little contact at the apex and was able to make the pass for P3 in Pro-Am.

I really, really wanted to get on the podium with RealTime and I wanted to do it with Adam, because everyone has been working so hard to get us there. I don’t think there’s a better place to do it than Elkhart Lake, Wisconsin, where the team is based and has a great history.

Like Adam said, it felt like a win. Somedays third place is good enough.