I’ve decided to write a blog to give our fans more insight on what’s going on in my mind and the direction the team are going. I will be the first to admit that I’m not a good writer, so please excuse any grammatical error.

I’ll start by letting you guys know that we will loose one of our valuable team member, Charlee Xiong. He is leaving us to move to Tulsa, Oklahoma with his family to possibly do chicken farming. I couldn’t believe it when I heard about it. I have no idea he is so sick and tired to do automotive stuff! Charlee has been with us the longest, out of all our team member.  He rose to the rank and was last year crew chief.  He has a vibrant personality and always bring the team spirit up, on and off the track.  We wish him good luck and success in his future endeavor, even if it is chicken farming. He will be greatly missed by all of us.

This year has been challenging for us. With the economy downturn effecting everyone including us, our partners and sponsors. Our budget has decreased substantially and this slows our progress down. This bugs me more than anything, not being able to move as fast as we like.  I love working on cars, and love the challenges the development stage presents.  Must be the engineer and competitive nature of me.

Given all the challenges, support by our fans and sponsors are more important than ever.   I took pride that we only use products that we truly believe.  This speaks volume to our sponsors and our partners.  Risking myself to sound like a salesman, I’m urging you, our readers and fans to go out and buy their products.  Better yet, you can buy the products through us, so we get percentage that can go to the team budget.

It is no secret that our main goal is to participate in more Speed World Challenge races.   For me, it is not enough to just participate.  I want to be competitive and eventually fight for the win.  Unfortunately, we are still far away from being competitive.  The car is not yet up to speed.  We, the team, are constantly working on it and made good improvements through out the year.  However, the improvements had stalled due to budget issue.  We recently changed our schedule and was planning to abandon our plan to participate in Speed World Challenge at all this year.  I was hoping that we can raise more funds and do more races next year.  However, WC vision has been bugging me to participate in the last two races.  They too, been affected by the economy and their car counts is way down.  I’d love to help as I’ve always been a fan of the series, but I have to take care of my team first and to ensure the continuity of our program.  That being said, I’ve decided that we are going to participate in Speed World Challenge at Laguna Seca in October.  If anything, we will know where we stand and can prepare better for next year.

Moving on to improvements we make for the car. The last couple of races has been in really hot weather. I started to notice that the car been running hot. The water, oil and transmission temperature is getting where we should be worried. We can upgrade the radiators and coolers, which is probably the smart thing to do.  However, we are in budget strap, like I mentioned before so I decided to try the cheaper solution first. I fabricated some shrouding to direct air better to the radiators and coolers. Hopefully, this will help keeping the temperature down. We will find out at the next race at Auto Club Speedway in Fontana.

Speaking of the next race, I will relinquish my driving duty to my team mate, Tom Lepper.   He will have to face tough challenges.  This track favor high HP car, and we expect the Neon SRT Turbo is the favourite to win.  From my last race at Infineon, I also know that the BMW is faster than us in the straight line.  The only reason I won last race is because he screwed up and ran wide in turn 7.   If I’m a betting man, I won’t bet in our team winning the next race.  That being said,  Tom is a past champions and has abundant of experience.  I have no doubt he will do well.  The toughest part for me is not driving/missing a race.  This however will be my first role as team principal where I’m not distracted by the driving aspect.  I look forward to the challenges.

This entry was posted on Sunday, July 19th, 2009 at 12:36 am and is filed under Andrie's blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.