Momentum (Moments In Between, part 5)

In some ways, an endurance race is a lot like a rocket launch. You put a lot of energy into getting up to speed and getting good track position. During those more aggressive parts of the race, you might make mistakes and have to work even harder to make up for them. You have a plan and a strategy, and you do your best to stick to them.

By the time the sun comes up on Sunday morning, you're mostly coasting on momentum. Track position has already been pretty firmly established, and you're doing your best to just keep things on the straight and level. The race isn't over yet, by any stretch of the imagination. But even for teams that are still trying to make moves, their goal will generally still be to hit a pace that they can maintain through the checker.

Survive the Night (Moments In Between, part 4)

A good endurance race is more slow than fast. And in the dead of winter, it's also more darkness than light. One of the unique challenges of the 25 Hours of Thunderhill is the amount time that's spent enduring the darkness.

Pit stops in the dark take longer. The growing fatigue of 6+ hours of racing combines with the reduced visibility to delay the most mundane of tasks, and the challenge is magnified for any extended diagnosis or repair. If a tool rolls out of sight, it's that much harder to find. Coordination between teammates becomes more difficult without the aid of hand signals and eye contact. And any dark corners in a cramped engine bay become that much darker and trickier to work in. So a repair that might be a quick fix during the day becomes a bit more of a slog at night.