TRYING TIMES

MONTREAL (17 Aug., 2012) – First came Jordan Taylor (below) gaining some seat time with David Donohue at The Glen, then Paul Tracy scored some time, too, with Donohue at the 2.709-mile Circuit Gilles Villeneuve course on Il Notre Dame.

What's up?

Well, succinctly, "tryouts."

Not that anything is amiss with Action Express Racing, it's just that the team clearly will again be competing in the Rolex Sports Car Series in 2013 despite persistent rumeurs (“French,” Menendez) of it opening an ALMS front.

Then again . . .

"We just want to make sure we have someone who is familiar with the team, its personnel, strategy and competitive ways should a situation so dictate," AER queso grande Bob Johnson said while undertaking flight (not self-powered) to Montreal Thursday.

"Mainly, we're looking at what next year may bring. Silly season is at hand, you know."

Tracy had only two spins in Friday's early afternoon practice session, successful in that Mr. Tracy scuffed only tires and asphalt; not car.

"Funny, as soon as I started telling people 'We signed Paul Tracy for Montreal,' they cringed and, in one way or another, suggested I might want to make sure we brought extra parts," Johnson deadpanned.

BUMP AND RUN

At the end of his opening shift at Watkins Glen International on Saturday past, Emil Assentato climbed from his AIM Autosport No. 69 FXDD Ferrari 458, then dejectedly made his way to the Stevenson Motorsports pits, seeking team owner John Stevenson.

"I apologized to him for wrecking his car," Assentato said. "It was my mistake."

It's a mistake all who watched SPEEDtv's live coverage couldn't help but see.

Assentato, who later remanded the car to co-driver Jeff Segal, had just taken the opening green flag for The Glen's Continental Tire 200 Presented By Dunn Tire and was bunched at the front after gridding on the GT field's outside second row, directly behind the No. 57 Stevenson Motorsports Chevrolet Camaro.

Caught out when a Porsche ahead of him suddenly slowed, Assentato reacted with a hard left, the left front of Assentato's Ferrari catching the Stevenson car on its right rear, spinning the Camaro and himself toward the top of Turn 1.

Supposedly fragile, the Ferrari hardly played that role, the thoroughbred's most apparent casualty being its hood, which laps later took flight and some others would’ve liked to take home.

The supposedly sturdy "American Iron" Camaro, with John Edwards in the driver's seat, was far less fortunate when, caught on the rebound for a second go between the two cars, the left-rear suspension was junked.

Given The Glen race was young and the season's end close at hand, Stevenson team director Mike Johnson (who gets all the pretty women, for some reason) (well, not that he’s had more than one, particularly special woman) (yet, if a bachelor he could've) ordered the team home. Instead, the order to rebuild was issued and the team soldiered on.

Given the championship points fight -- and having in the prior Indy race having fallen sharply from the top's vicinity -- the team needed to soldier onward.

Although it hadn't won until early July's Sahlen's Six (Sahlen's 6 Hours of The Glen), prior to that the team also hadn't once finished worse than seventh (the season's second race at Barber Motorsports Park) and in five subsequent races to BMP finished on the podium in each.

Then there was Indy.

Stevenson Motorsports came into the inaugural Indy race with a five-point lead in the NAEC (North American Endurance Championship) GT standings and, with the No. 57 leading a second-high 27 race laps, all appeared copasetic until it literally hit the wall and, well, didn't win the NAEC.

The team soldiered on, as it would also later do at The Glen, but came home 15th and 14th, respectively, in each.

Clearly falling like a boulder tossed into a well-maintained pool's deep end, it's not been fun to watch for most everyone except the FXDD team, who has remained atop the GARS (Grand-Am Rolex Series) points standings despite suffering its own ails since the Ferrari's last podium, also at the Sahlen's Six.

Ironically, the expectation of FXDD's recent tribulations is pretty much what kept the Stevenson folks looking forward to the "next" race, knowing that in a human world, “things happen.”

They just didn't expect it to be happening to theirownselves.

CAMERON GETS THE CALL

It was 2009 and Dane Cameron (at below right), who has lived the whole of his life while under motorsports' big tent, was at Barber Motorsports Park sitting at the edge of The Racers Edge hauler's side door.

Head firmly in hand, Cameron looked to be completely dispirited with motorsports and the political activity within. He appeared as if he wished most to run quickly in but one direction: away.

As old folks have learned, practiced or from which did indeed quickly hauled tail, "politics" is nearly everywhere, absent total solitude.

Save two races -- one at season's start; one in the middle -- Cameron, um, "vacationed" the following year, pondering his future fate within the only tent he's really ever known.

He then returned.

Paired in 2011 for the most part with James Gué in a Dempsey Racing RX-8 and even though absent a win in competition, the pair finished fourth in the GARS GT championship after having finished fifth-or-better in half the Rolex Series' 12 GT races that season.

However, politics weren't absent that year and, in fact, were a tad more vociferously present for sponsor Global Diving's final year in GARS. This time evidently unaffected, certainly not to the very evident degree of such in 2009, Cameron's results were largely consistent whether in or out of whatever political storm may have been occurring at the time.

A Left Coast Karter as are a substantial number have been in this sportscar thing, Cameron started quickly from the gate, immediately scoring two Jim Russell Racing School-associated championship titles.

The following year, Cameron went head-to-head with a chap we all know today as "J. R. Hildebrand," to whom Cameron finished second in the U.S. F2000 National Championship.

In 2007 Cameron won the Star Mazda Championship, in the course of which he finished only once out of the top-10.

Despite the 2008 Atlantic Championship ultimately falling short of personal expectations (something along the lines of "first, always"), in his first race that year at Road America, Cameron started from the race's pole and finished second.

In short, Cameron's competitive record is "not that bad," huh?

Cameron, who raced a Chip Ganassi-prepared DP for the first time in 2006 when all of 18 years in age, will soon have an updated Gen2-to-Gen3 BMW-powered Riley in his hands, readying for 2013.

Surely, it’s a great Team Sahlen story in a lot of different ways, but its also a great Dane Cameron story, too, who somehow found deep within him an abiding love of this sportscar racing thing and stayed with it.

By the way: Cameron's co-driver during the earlier-referenced dark 2009 Barber Motorsports Park episode was Wayne Nonnamaker, who evidently saw something inside of Cameron, even when Cameron was questioning it.

Later,

DC