With eighteen minutes left to go in a nine-hour race, we were winning the damn thing. But it wasn’t to be.

Sam’s report is here. It boils down to this: With just one fewer minor mistake, we had it won. We had a muffler knocked off by the driver after me and a contact incident by the fourth driver. Without either of those, we would have had more than the 40.8 seconds by which we lost the race.

My 96-minute stint was pretty brilliant if I do say so myself, I wasn’t the fastest lap (the track rubbered in later in the day after the rain stopped) but I was the only driver on our team to improve our position through on-track passes and I had the lowest average laptime for my stint. On the negative hand I used a lot of tire through a battle with the 300E that lasted well over an hour and involved something like two dozen changes of position. I probably should have laid back and made one big move instead of harassing the guy for passes in the curvy parts knowing he was going to re-pass me on the front straight. The good news is that eventually I broke his heart and drove away.

I was more tired than I should have been after my stint. I’m still not caught up to where I was before the accident. And there’s something in my drivers suit that is making me break out in bloody sores. I think it might be too much Febreeze.

Had we won today, I would have been the only person of whom I know to win three affordable series with three different teams:

• Lemons Flat Rock 2007 with Bernie’s Revenge
• ChumpCar Buttonwillow 2013 with Greg Smith’s Mopar team
• AER NJMP 2014 with the media car

Doesn’t mean much to most people, to win these races, but like Al Pacino says to Cameron Diaz in Any Given Sunday, “Just win one.” It’s not easy to beat 85 cars in a race, or even the 22 other cars in today’s race. Second is okay, though, and I’ll take it.