The Butch as it's known... is a special Memorial Race held each year as part of the regular Oakshade schedule. It was also a stop on the ALMS series which includes most of the Oakshade regulars. A strong car count was in attendance. We spent some time in the shop this past week working on the setup and we were about to see how things were to go. Right away in hot laps we knew we had finally found something. Kevin was pretty happy with the car so we made no changes before the heat race.

Starting on the outside front row(we've had a lot of good draws this year), Kevin easily pull away from the field. ALMS was taking 4 from each heat race with the winning of each redrawing. Kevin would draw the number 2 starting spot along side Brian Ruhlman. On the initial start 2 cars would get together further back in the field.The second restart would set off one of the best battles we've seen all year. Kevin and Brian would battle it out for more than 10 laps side by side. Kevin kept working the low side while Brian wouldn't give up the top. Both cars building a gap between them and 3rd place. Kevin would finally work his way to a solid lead by lap 13 and would maintain control past half way. With 8 laps to go, he was getting into some pretty heavy traffic that was racing each other pretty hard. 3 cars were running 3 wide with no real good lane to get by. Then they worked it down to 2 cars as one would pull off. The remaining cars were switching lanes in front of Kevin nearly pushing him into the front stretch wall while he attempted to pass. While all of this was going on, Schlenk would break from the pack and take over second. The lapped cars were easily slowing Kevin's progress by a half second a lap. With 5 to go Schlenk was working the very low side of the track where Kevin's car was unable to run as fast and sneak by Kevin to take the lead. Kevin would break through the lapped cars and begin to reel in Schlenk but we would just run out of laps to finish 2nd.  Here's the link the the full story.... ALMS Series - Oakshade

It was a great night and a great race, now we just need to keep the lead past 25 laps on a regular night this coming week. We were really happy with the run, if it weren't for the lapped traffic we would have had a huge lead by the checkers, but hey, that's racing. We'll try again this coming week.