First of all, congrats to Danny, and the rest of the podium finishers, all of the competitors and race staff for making the 60th running a great event! I do not want to take away from that, so thought I would not include the following remarks in the June Sprints thread.
I truly apologize to all my fellow competitors and Advanced Autosports for my restrictor not being in compliance.
It was certainly a massive disappointment and a bit of a shock to say the least and mostly embarrassing. With that I am truly glad to see the level of scrutiny coming to the class this year. Hopefully it will ultimately catch all the people trying to take a short cut to the front.
I originally bought this car in 2009, but sold it to a buddy as I decided to go GT1 racing instead, followed by some continental races in ST, some NASA Super Touring and finally GT2 in 2013. None of it went well and I sold my GT2 Corvette - (the one with the small fire at the Runoffs in 2013) early last year and decided to hang it up.
The Miata I sold to my buddy was still just a shell with a cage and was at the shop responsible for the disaster GT1 and GT2 seasons. I told my buddy I would help him get it done so it would leave the shop completed and then we could do what we wanted with it. He had already paid for labor, he just never had the funding for the parts.
In January I green lighted and funded the finishing of it and it was to be done in April, didn't get done until July. Ran its first race at Gingerman and we did ok, 8th I believe, but I had a great time and wanted to do this a bit more. At the time it made 123rwhp. Ran a couple of council races, but the car was still not complete. Frustrated with the shop and knowing they were pretty much shut down I asked Dave at Advanced to go collect it in November and told them to fix all that was wrong with it. There was quite a bit. A totally gutted dashboard, doors (without the door bars that allow for that) ACT clutch, some after market fly wheel and a host of other issues.
I had no idea what we had for motor, but was not too worried about since I seemed to be a bit down compared to others. As soon as the rules were finalized in this year, we shipped the head to Stewart and due to timing he did it himself and got it back in time for Road Atlanta. It did not take him long to realized the head was ported pretty heavily and I ended up having to find a new core and shipping it to him.
Back together it put down more power than Advanced had every seen and this head was legal compared to what came off. We wrote it off Stewart just doing a meticulous job and getting a bit lucky. At this point nobody thought to look at the restrictor, because why would you? We would never think to inspect it as it's one of the easiest things to catch. They are routinely pulled and inspected and as you can see from the picture, anyone would see that it's not right. I was so worried about the power after Road Atlanta as you could just tell it was strong and so could some others. But I still had some I was pretty equal with, so I thought I just had something that the front runners did in terms of power.
The bottom line is I never knew and it would never be my intention to cheat. I hate that this class has become so expensive to run. I ran in the class from 2001 to 2007 and had at best a $9k car maybe 10 and I was competitive.
It's completely ok if you do not believe me or my story here, but I do want to be clear that Dave and his amazing crew at Advanced Autosports had no idea, did not build the car, and nor would they ever do anything like that. I believe most reading that will know this, but I had to say it as I just feel awful about this happening under their tent. They do not deserve this kind of press and again had nothing to do with the original build. They were handed a pile of garbage and righted almost all of the wrong. I do not hold them accountable for not checking the restrictor, again, why would anyone try to cheat here.
I am hopeful the new restrictor will not make that huge of a difference and not because of future races, but because of how it will reflect on my previous race performances with this car.
Thanks for reading this far and again my sincere apologies to my competitors and the Advanced Autosports team.
Karim Alex Talbot SM #4
clubracer6@aol.com
224-622-8900