Preparing for an event like Onelap is tough, you never know what is going to happen when you get there. For some teams, like ours, you never know what is going to happen on the way to there either...

We have two stories, because we entered two cars. One story is about the racecar, the Blue 2004 Dodge SRT-4, and the other story is about this website, the Yellow 2003 SRT-4. Up until the actual start of the event, it was easy to keep up with the progress of the Yellow team, the car, and their prep for creating the most up-to-date image and video gallery of the 2005 event. After the start, I have no idea what they did, where they did it, or how they managed it, but they created a website that crushed several servers for our partners and will continue to gain hits after the event is long past.

Unfortunately, that’s all an underappreciated story, so rather than dedicate a lot of space to it, I will just bring in the highlights as they are appropriate. It seems appropriate now.

The Yellow team assembled an array of VIOSPORT and ChaseCam bullet cameras, ChaseCam suction cup mounts, power supplies, camcorders, remotes, microphones, extension leads, laptops, cell modems, and various other sundry equipment required for capturing, creating, and uploading video and images as quickly as possible.

The Blue team had a different mission, to place in the top 10 overall in a front-wheel drive car without a zillion aftermarket horsepower. Work on the car leading up to the event was not frenzied, we had time to properly corner-weight the car after lightening it somewhat, and bolted on the new wheels and tires. Then, the morning before we headed out to the start of the event, Mopar Performance delivered the Stage 3R turbo upgrade kit.

Normally, no work is to be done the night before an event like Onelap, but as usual, we broke that rule. With less than 24 hours available before driving the cars to the registration and technical inspection, we pulled the exhaust manifold/turbo assembly, upgraded the fuel system, and performed the other minor tasks that added a third more horsepower to the car. We tuned the car (gapped the sparkplugs) and put it to bed.

Registration was uneventful for both teams, and while people seemed to think that the power upgrade the night before was unadvised, we were confident in the quality of the kit we installed. With 9 years of Onelap participation, there were a lot of friendships to rekindle in the host hotel’s bar that evening. We were ready and anxious to begin the event, to get an idea of what the competition looked like on the track, and to see how our own preparation compared.

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