This past weekend at Sonoma, formally aka Infinion, aka Sears Point was the World Touring Car Championship. This was a fun filled weekend of racing for WTCC casr, Maserati Trofeo, Auto Gp, and USTCC.

The #58 MINI Cooper S of Rich Peterson was entered in USTCC with Driver Andy Chittum, the BMW Spec E30 leader. Friday was full with two 45 minute practice seasons and later in the afternoon a 30 qualifying season for Saturdays race. We started off great with third place times in both practice seasons, and qualifying went just as well as we placed 3rd for Saturdays race. Saturday morning we had a qualifying season for Sunday's race and again we were third fastest. So Sunday we would be starting third.

Saturdays race line up Honda Civic, Volvo C30, MINI S, Mitsubishi Lancer, Honda Prelude, BMW M3, Mazdaspeed 3, BMW M3, Hyundai Genesis, Dodge SRT-4 for the top ten plus others.

As this was a FIA sanctioned event it was run like a F1 event with starting lights, sector timing and such. Great fun for all the teams as we never get this type of service.

Out the cars go for the parade lap then grid up on the front straight for the standing start and wait for the starting light to light up, the the lights go out and the race is on. The Mitsubishi with it's four wheel drive jumped to the early lead, but was over taken within the next two laps by the Civic and the Volvo. We were stuck behind for 6 or 7 laps till Andy was able to pass on the outside of the carousel (T6). the #58 MINI was in third place with clear track ahead and a chance to catch the #80 Volvo in second. The track side announcer says the MINI is running the fastest lap times of anyone at this point. We watch Andy cut a 8 second deficient to 4 seconds within one lap and waddled it down till he was on the bumper of the Volvo on the last lap going into turn 2. With lap traffic coming up it worked in the Volvo favor and was to pull away a short distance and the race finished that way with the Civic 1st, Volvo 2nd and MINI 3rd. This was our first podium finish for the#58, and we were quite content. Other teams were now asking where did that MINI come from from and it can't be the same one. We can say yes it is.

Our only bad news was our new tires were not delivered. The MINI is allowed to run on 15's everyone else runs on 17 or 18. Well there were plenty of 17 tires around but no 15's. I had been called on Thursday that our tires were there. But NO. So we were forced to run on our old well used tires for the 2nd race on Sunday. Because we placed third on Saturday we were awarded 50# of extra weight to even the field. We felt that some suspension changes were in order and made those. Something I don't like to do but we were all in agreement, We had already podiumed this weekend. Make the changes and go for the win.

Sundays field was much like Saturdays field. We started third and got a great start and moved into second and held that for several laps. But the extra weight and changes didn't make us faster but slower by 5/10th or more We lost third and then forth but did hold on to a 5th place finish. Still a very good result.



So we finish the weekend with a 3rd and 5th place finish for USTCC rounds 5 and 6. Round 7 is at Laguna Seca in October.