April 14 , 2008 - Team Autoxrs Headquarters

The Autoxrs Team was back on the road for the Appalachian Sports Car Club season opener at Giant Center in Hershey, PA. Sharing driving duties for the weekend would be team owner Sean Banerjee and co-owner Bobby Banerjee. Sean went on to finish 5th in class while Bobby took home 7th place. In PAX Sean finished 45th and Bobby 64th out of 119 drivers.

Taking the win in STS2 was Ian Baker, who also finished in 3rd place at the 2007 Solo Nationals in STS2. In 2nd place was Dan Shalkowski, 3rd place had course co-designer Eric Simmons and in 4th place was Carrie Snyder who codrove with Baker and Shalkowski in Baker's CRX.

When the team unloaded the car at 7AM they were greeted with a cold and dreary day. Forecast the evening before had called for rain, despite this the team decided to take a chance and run the shaved Bridgestone RE-01Rs. ASCC's heat structure based on car number meant that the brothers would run in a cold and wet pavement in heat 1 and this meant grip would be at a premium.

The younger Banerjee brother, Sean, opted to take the first run and quickly ran into issues, a missed gate at the end of a multi cone slalom sent him into the wrong direction. Sean quickly reevaluated the situation and finished the remainder of the course. Older brother, Bobby, ran into the same scenario in the exact same location and also ended up with a DNF on his first run. With only 4 runs counting for the day, it was down to three runs to prove who was faster.

Sean's second run resulted in the same miscue, but this time he managed to save it in time to record a timed run. Sean rode with older brother Bobby on the second run to ensue both of them were on the time cards. Sean's third run, with Bobby as passenger, proved to be faster but dirty as he slid wide numerous times. "We had no traction, the RE-01Rs do not like cold weather" commented Sean after the second run. Bobby's third run proved to be slower than Sean's, but clean as both brothers made their way into the timesheets. Sean took dad out on his fourth and final run, enroute to another dirty run in the 78 second range. Bobby's final run was a 78 second flat run with a cone, and at the end of heat 1 the team was in 1st and 3rd place in STS2. The pavement was quickly getting warmer and the faster drivers were running in heats 3 and 4. The team knew they had no chance of salvaging a podium finish and chose to pack the car up and head back to the garage.

"The car worked well, it is obvious that we are still fighting an understeer issue" said car owner Sean. The recent North Hills test and tune proved that the solution is to completely remove the front sway bar and the team will test this new setup in a race environment in next weekend's event at North Hills.

Due to technical issues the team did not participate on Sunday.