LOCATION, LOCATION, LOCATION

MONTREAL (Aug 28, 2010) – Scoring their eighth 2010 Rolex Sports Car Series Daytona Prototype win Saturday at the conclusion of the Montreal 200, Scott Pruett, Memo Rojas and the Chip Ganassi Racing w/ Felix (y José) Sabates’ No. 01 TELMEX BMW-Riley likewise reset the Rolex Series’ single-season race win-record mark.

Contested on the 2.7-mile Circuit Gilles Villeneuve F1 course, by winning the TELMEX team recorded the greater number of the race’s lead laps, secured only after shrewd pit strategy combined with excellent pit-crew work put second-half driver Pruett in front of Alex Gurney in Bob Stallings’ No. 99 GAINSCO Chevrolet-Riley, in which pole-sitter and co-driver Jon Fogarty earlier compiled the second-highest number of laps led at 25.

With two laps out front and the only other driver to lead the race was eventual third-place finisher Ricky Taylor, who started Wayne Taylor Racing’s No. 10 SunTrust Ford-Dallara Daytona Prototype before handing off to co-driver Max Angelelli.

A hallmark of the real estate and business industry, a smartly chosen location also proved valuable for the TELMEX team’s Montreal 200 “operations center,” giving the team a valuable edge on its competitors, according to Pruett.

Located for Montreal’s three previous races in the open air near the NASCAR Nationwide Series hauler parking area clear of the Circuit Gilles Villeneuve’s F1 garages, TELMEX team manager Tim Keene this time chose to be situated in pit road’s first available pit.

“We set up there because of Grand-Am’s pit road traffic procedures,” Pruett said to a reporter Sunday morning while the two killed time in a seriously malfunctioning Joseph Philippe Pierre Yves Elliott Trudeau International Airport security line.

Finishing two-seconds-and-change ahead of second place, Pruett clearly was able to drive away from and maintain a comfortable distance ahead of a hotly pursuing Gurney and his GAINSCO car – something Rojas was unable to accomplish earlier, being kept at bay by a too-wide, just-fast-enough Fogarty.

“Our first pit stop also helped because we didn’t have to subsequently take as much fuel as did the others,” Pruett added, “but our pit guys did a helluva job in getting us out front of the (No.) 99 when I took over for Memo.”

Altogether almost but not quite clinching their second Daytona Prototype driving championship in three seasons, the two TELMEX hot shoes must each additionally enter and perform admirably at the wheel of their race car during the Sept. 11 Utah 250 (hereinafter referred to as “race”) at Miller Motorsports Park (hereinafter referred to as one of three additional possible, but not absolutely, positively definite descriptions not necessarily but probably listed in order of preference: “Miller, “MMP” or, in the native Ute tongue, “Place where wind finds no human”) occurring in a locale known but usually improperly pronounced as Tooele, Utah., such driver or drivers entering and performing admirably at the wheel of their race car to occur only during a stipulated period falling between that official action defined as that action which starts the race’s official start and that official action that ends with the start of the official end, notwithstanding a driver and/or two-or-more drivers driving time having exceeded the sum total of the other driver’s driving time, vice-versa and versa-vice, thereby causing a conundrum known as the Grandfather Paradox, the use of quantum time-travel transportation notwithstanding, for which Stephen Hawking has been retained as final and ultimate arbiter and judge to unequivocally rule in the, um, matter?

Then and only then may the parties of the first part party hardy with the parties of the second hardy part, unless the party of the third part, namely Chip Ganassi, independently hardly parties at the Sept. 13 Las Vegas Rolex Awards Banquet presented by SunTrust.

Then and only then may either or all of the parties of any part kiss the trophy girl and/or girls, unless, of course . . . nah, I ain’t going there.

SCRAPPERS

Starting third and overcoming a bad-luck lap down to the field, Paul Edwards was dead set on making the most of a late race yellow that ended with about 14-minutes remaining.

Edwards and his Leighton Reese No. 07 Airjack.com/Mobil 1 Chevrolet Corvette then undertook the type of charge to the front that stirs men’s souls. Yet, little else should be expected from a racer who has all but patented the move.

In truth, a win this year by the barely funded team was still all but inevitable given the decently deep talent pool that starts at the top with scrapper Leighton Reese – a Minnesotan whose winning ways have ranged from snowmobiles to thunderous sprint cars – and has for years infused his team with a never-say-die belief that’s percolated throughout his organization.

Among that organization’s members is Tony Dowe who, some might recall, has had a life rich in the smell of warm castor oil and filled with the melodic notes of a dropped wrench onto a shop’s floor – not to mention the sheer joy of a busted knuckle here and there, too.

One of Dowe’s earliest gigs had him hooking up in the 1960’s with Morris Nunn’s kick-butt Ensign F3 program, later teaming with another Englishman and wherein shepherded into Daytona’s 1988 Rolex 24 Victory Lane was a Tom Walkinshaw Jaguar driven by Raul Boesel, Martin Brundle, Eddie Cheever, Johnny Dumfries and John Nielsen.

Joining the Rolex Series eight races deep into the 2005 season, lead team-driver Edwards that year won in only his second race and added two more wins in the seven-consecutive he contested.

Teamed with Kelly Collins and running a full Rolex Series schedule in 2006, Edwards finished third in that year’s championship and, through last season, Edwards posted championship finishes of second (2007), first (2008) and fourth (2009).

The other half of Reese’s dynamic driving duo is Motorcycle Hall of Fame member Scott Russell, who in 1995 rallied from dead last to a 40-second win by race end after a full-on, early race Turn-1, coming-off-the-tri-oval-at-speed tumble that would’ve and has demoralized scores of riders having experienced the same.

Known as “Mr. Daytona” to motorcyclists the world over, Russell earned the moniker by becoming the first rider – today one of only two – to have claimed five Daytona 200 victories in the race’s nearly 80-year history.

However good the team’s members, though, money remains that which most enables a racer’s world of going ‘round.

Standing alone and off to the side watching Montreal’s delicate post-race “Podium Hat Dance,” so tight is the team’s money flow that Dowe was awaiting word on whether Reese could cover Dowe’s cost for the Sept. 11 Utah 250 race at Miller Motorsports Park.

The team’s successful weekend started Friday when co-driver Russell qualified the car third-fastest, behind a pole record-setting Boris Said (co-driver Eric Curran; Marsh Racing’s No. 31 Whelen Corvette, which by race end faded to ninth-in-class) and Andrew Davis (co-driver Robin Liddell; Stevenson Motorsports’ No. 57 Vin Solutions Camaro GT.R on the outside pole, which by race-end banged its way to third place. Or should that be “got banged?” Oh, well, Liddell and Davis at least together have more Montreal podiums than any other driver pair).

Pulled from the car – which, um, displeased Russell, believing such to be premature – caution flags, pit and race strategies then combined to put Edwards back into contention and, ultimately, out front.

With fewer than 15 minutes remaining for the final green-flag run to race end, Edwards pulled yet another one of his “bat-outta-hell” moves out of the bag, taking the car from boring also-ran to first place and along the way passing two, count ‘em, two Stevenson Camaros in the hands of darn good, no, make that excellent shoes worn by Liddell and Ronnie Bremer (co-driver Gunter Schaldach; Stevenson Motorsports’ No. 97 Lala Camaro GT.R).

Possessed, that Edwards boy is.

Unfortunately, having departed the track for Sunday’s Indianapolis MotoGP race, Russell wasn’t around to celebrate the Montreal win.

“Taking Scott out of the car (early) was one of the toughest decisions I’ve ever made as a car owner,” Reese said after the race win. “Man, no lie, I almost cried, but the decision had to be made and I made it.”

Climbing from the car smiling broadly, Edwards hardly looked as though he’d done little more than take a Sunday drive.

Winning has a way of causing such.

HAPPY TRAILS?

Once again, another season draws closer to conclusion.

Once again, most everyone in the paddock are gutting it out – whether the result of a lack of money or a lack of steam – yet guided by a light found at tunnel’s end, now about two weeks away, anxiously awaiting the present season’s end . . . so as to begin work on the next season.

Still, some are left wondering, “What happened!?”

“I have never, in all of my racing life, gone through such a season as that I experienced this year,” Bill Lester at Montreal said of his 2010 Rolex Series “thrash” during which his No. 7 Starworks BMW-Riley went through front splitters as does a newborn through diapers.

“We went through 7-8 splitters,” Lester said.

Count ‘em; at roughly $15,000 a pop, well, you get the idea.

That’s why Starworks owner Peter Baron at one point was reduced to wandering around the Watkins Glen (2) paddock the evening before the Crown Royal 200 at The Glen, wearing something on his face that was somewhere between a daze and vacant stare into nothingness, all the while hoping to reconcile how he might somehow finagle yet another splitter.

As the sun faded from a paddock already nearly emptied of teams headed for partying, Baron finally decided that if the hotshot drivers would commit to replacing whatever parts they break from that point, forward, then Baron would acquire the team’s 14^th splitter.

“They didn’t go for it,” Baron said.

“Big surprise there,” Lester laughingly said at Montreal, where he could do little more than provide moral support to those on the Starworks’ team.

“They’re talented, very talented but those guys think nothing of tearing up something then just replacing it,” Lester said. “They don’t understand, maybe just don’t comprehend that this isn’t an F1 paddock and that Starworks is on a tight budget.”

“So, when they went into their ‘but eet’s so cheep’ routine I started suggesting that they pay for it if it’s so doggone cheap. For some reason, it never worked.”

“Look, I understand that people make mistakes, accidents happen. Been there; done that. But 7-8 splitters!? That isn’t an accident, that’s a serial splitter killer on the loose.”

According to Baron, the irony of it all is that he’d put some pad room in the budget expecting Lester to emerge as the most likely cause of helping the Riley Technologies’ parts-shop employees feed the kids (who some believed to be named Bill, Bill and Bill . . . “Riley,” that is).

“So I bring in a bunch of pro drivers and what do they do?” Baron asked rhetorically.

Fast-forward to Montreal and Baron’s ardently wishing to “score one” for the Gip . . . uh, Ryan Dalziel.

Then a ring and pinion gear fails, taking the car out.

“I actually dreamed about that last night,” Starworks team engineer and car-constructor extraordinaire Bill Riley said Sunday morning, long after he and a certain reporter – now just beginning an eight-hour wait for the next flight back to the Good Ol’ USA – had cleared a seriously malfunctioning Joseph Philippe Pierre Yves Elliott Trudeau International Airport security gauntlet, staffed by people whose favorite expression was “Up your nose with a rubber hose,” expressed in their favorite “romance” language of choice, of course.

One supposes they hadn’t yet invested in a copy of Dale Carnegie’s “How to Win Friends and Influence People.”

Well, back to a reflective, if not dejected Bill Riley.

“I’ve played that over and over in my head,” Riley said.

When drivers Mike Forest, Dalziel and the Starworks No. 8 BMW-Riley team started packing it in after only eight of the race’s 62 laps, one can commiserate with owner Baron who after Montreal said, “I’ll see you at Miller (Motorsports Park) if I don’t slit my wrists, first.”

Later,

DC