Klaus Graf's blog: Wild and wonderful at Mid-Ohio

Heading to Mid-Ohio this year brought back a bunch of different feelings. The Mid-Ohio Sports Car Course is where the Muscle Milk team made its return to the American Le Mans Series two years ago, in 2009. It's more or less where it all started for us, but it's also the scene of Greg Pickett's big crash last year aboard the Porsche RS Spyder. To be able to come back and take the win at that track this year after what we went through in 2010 was a big reward for everyone and a special win for Greg.

Obviously, Greg's incident was not something I wanted to think about too much heading into the race weekend because I wanted to keep my concentration on the present moment; but to be honest, I did think about it the first couple laps when driving in that area.

You arrive at high speed there and the braking zone is very short because the right-hand corner is actually quite quick. So, it's a very hard, short braking from a very high speed. It's not exactly the ideal place on a track to be thinking about someone else's accident, so you need to get it out of your system, not think about it anymore and focus on the job.

And that's exactly what I did, and believe me, mental focus was key when we got to the race day downpour! But more about that later.

The Mid-Ohio course is a very technically challenging track and, to add to its level of difficulty, it goes through many different conditions as the weekend goes by due to all of the different series racing there that weekend.

When came time to qualify, the track was in very difficult conditions. You didn't know heading into one corner and the next if it would be dirty or not. As I've said before, the conditions are the same for everyone but it's hard to go out there and put in a perfect lap, which is what you want to do when qualifying. Our lap wasn't perfect but we did get really close.

We found a lot of speed between our morning practice and qualifying but it was not quite enough to get pole position. However, we were very close to the Dyson car and that is always encouraging. I was very confident heading into the race. We had made some additional changes overnight that we knew would be beneficial.

At Mid-Ohio, it's important to be careful when working on the setup of the car, because of the changing track conditions. When we ran on the Friday, the IndyCars had not been on track yet, so we had to factor in that the grip level would be different come race time the next day.

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