4 car diary - Rolex 24, EFR dialed in

But Gremlins Still On Board
By Bill King

Back aboard The Boss Snowplow No. 4 Howard-Boss Motorsports Pontiac Crawford at 4:00 a.m., Elliott Forbes-Robinson set out to delete a chapter or two from the woeful tale of the broken header. Running easily through an hour of mostly 1:49 laps, Forbes-Robinson was approaching his pit window when he called in that the low fuel light had come on at the exact moment that he ran out of fuel.

After a multiple exchange between driver and several crew members, it was determined that the IPU light was what was on, indicating an error in the engine management system. Pushing the "yellow button" as instructed successfully reset the recalcitrant unit and the No. 4 motored on in for tires and fuel, but not before a yellow came out to cover EFR's slow progress around Turns 3 and 4. The pit stop was a lengthy 1:14.25.

There was no drop in performance following the service stop. On the leader's lap 497, EFR blew past his teammate Jan Lammers in the No. 20 CITGO Pontiac Crawford - Lammers being the race leader by two laps over the No. 10 Pontiac Riley. That put EFR seventh in Daytona Prototype, 16 laps adrift the 20 car.

After Forbes-Robinson pitted for routine service at leader lap 516 and turned the No. 4 over to Jimmie Johnson during a 48.185sec stop, he virtually repeated Leitzinger's observation about tire set inconsistency from the previous driver stint: "Sometimes you get a set that'll last a whole stint really great. Another set won't work at all right from the start. You just never know what you're going to get. It could be worth a second a lap."

We joked about his complaining on the opening lap of this stint that he couldn't understand the radio messages from the pits: "It was like BLAH- RRAPP-GRRR! I couldn't understand a thing."

I pointed out that after his little fit of pique that Bob Leitzinger, who has been calling the lap times to the drivers for 17 hours, started sounding like Laurence Olivier. Leitzinger just grinned and winked.

Editor's note:
Please view all the diary entries by Bill King on the No. 4 Howard-Boss Motorsports Pontiac Crawford at http://www.motorsport.com/news/series.asp?S=GRANDAM