As one of my friends put it, I’m going to a party and there’s going to be a race there! The Grand Prix of Trois Rivieres is quite the event. I was there two years ago with Mazda MX-5 Cup and it’s a huge party.

The race event was short in comparison to most of our events. We had no promoter test day and our event was held over the course of a day and a half. Normally we run with the GS cars but the two groups were separated and they had all of their practice, qualifying, and their race on the same day. Our schedule was initially set up the same and we were only scheduled out on track on Friday. We ended up having a schedule change so we had two practices and our qualifying on Friday with our race on Saturday morning.

We arrived late on Wednesday night and the closest hotel I could find when I made my reservations was in Grand Mere about 30 minutes from the track. We got lost heading to the track on Thursday morning due to our lack of the French language but I did make it in time for my practice. Since Chris left we didn’t have a second driver lined up but Jeff was able to find a French Canadian guy, Etienne Borgeat, from the Canadian Touring Car Championship. He was driving a Solstice in that series and I’m not sure he’d ever done any endurance racing but has raced at Trois Rivieres many times.

I took the first part of the session and I was amazed at how quickly the track came back to me. My session went well and I was pretty pleased since I didn’t have much time on the track. This would definitely be the weekend I’d have to step it up quickly to get on pace. Etienne took the car second and was just a tenth or two of a second fast than I was. We were paddocked outside of the track and had to leave our cars inside the track. We didn’t have much opportunity to do much to the cars in between sessions.

The second session went even better but Etienne was in the car first and when I got in the brake pedal was very low. It was a little scary as we were racing on a street course surrounded by walls with no margin for error. I ended up having to brake early to make sure I had the car slowed enough for the corners and my session actually went pretty well. My lap times were about a half second quicker than they had been in the first session.

We didn’t really make any set up changes on the car as it was handling really well. I got new brake pads and tires for qualifying and was hoping to drop a good second or so. I think I struggled with the new brakes and ended up braking too hard and too late for most of the corners. I didn’t feel like I was carrying as much speed as I could have through the corners. I was focused too much on my time and not my driving. I ended up 17th on grid and only bettered my previous time by a couple tenths of a second.

The start of the race seemed strange without the GS cars in our group and it was a very slow start. I got a decent start but was trying to be cautious into the first few corners. There were no major incidents until we got to Turn six which is a very tight corner with no runoff or area for any mistakes. Two cars were collected there and we almost slowed to a stop. We ended up going full course caution after that and on the third lap Jeff pulled me in for a fuel top off. I was running second to last and we had talked about this before the race started. We can only run about an hour and five minutes on a tank of fuel and they felt this would be a good strategy if I ended up towards the back of the field. It only took about 15 seconds but by the time I got back out on course, I wasn’t running with anyone. I could see one of the Minis up in front of me but didn’t think I could catch him. Since I didn’t have a lot of time on the track I had a hard tine gauging my speed and wasn’t doing as well as I would have liked. I had to really dig and it was more of a mental challenge than anything else. I finally saw the #82 BMW 330i in front of me and that helped me push harder. We went full course caution again about 30 minutes into the race and I finally got caught up again with the pack. I was able to pass a few cars but then came to the Mazdaspeed 3 of Charlie Putnum. I knew I was faster than him but just couldn’t find a way by. I had followed him for a good 20+ minutes when I finally just dove inside on Turn 6. I had followed him for so long and he had a really good entrance into both Turns 3 and 6 which helped me go faster through there. I drove for another half hour or so until we got another full course caution about an hour and fifteen minutes into the race. This was when we changed drivers. Our pit stop went well but one of our crew guys had both feet on pit wall. This resulted in a 5 second penalty for us and then Etienne was off. He drove very well and clean throughout the remainder of the race and we were running as high as 7th. He dropped down to 9th towards the end of the race and then the #12 Kia of Burrows/Hopwood came into the pits with some type of engine problem with only a few laps left in the race. This moved us back up to 8th which is where we finished. Our car finished the race clean and in the top 10. That’s quite a feat for this event and a great finish for us and the Next Generation team. It was an awesome weekend and I’m hoping for an even better weekend next month at Miller for our season finale.