Endurance race pushes both cars and drivers to the limits

TOOELE — The outcome of the Grand Am Sunchaser race at Miller Motorsports Park this week will involve more than just a fast car and good cornering abilities.

It'll take muscles.

In the main event, drivers will pull to the line at 11 a.m. For the next seven hours and 30 minutes, or 1,000 kilometers, whichever comes first, the cars will stop only to change tires, get fuel and change drivers.

Last year's race went 193 laps or roughly 900 miles in nine hours.

The endurance race is a favorite among some auto-racing drivers. As one driver said during the inaugural event last year, it pushes both cars and drivers to the limits.

What it takes to win, said last year's winning team of Mark Patterson and Oswaldo Negri, is good steady driving, concentration and "fighting off fatigue ... especially on this track."

The Miller track is long, 4.48 miles, and turny — 24 turns in all, going both left and right.

The winning Michael Shank team was driving a Lexus Riley prototype race car.

One difference this year is there may be more cars on the track. Last year there were 40 cars in the final race.

So what is it like to race on the Miller track?

Jon Fogarty, an eight-time polesitter, recently gave a turn-by-turn preview. Here is a condensed look at his report.

" Miller is long with many corners, but after a few laps it's easy to break the track into sections and focus on separate parts rather than the whole. The first third for me includes what I call corners 1 through 10 (that's more than a lot of tracks have in total!) This includes the first set of' 'esses', beginning at turn 1. This is a fast, left-right-left-left sequence that is very high speed, with the final left being flat out. Because the last corner can be taken flat, it is important to be patient in the early portions of this sequence, so that you are building speed throughout making the exit of the second to last corner the start of your straightaway leading into a slow long left-hander ...