THE RACE IS
NEVER OVER
9/20/2026BY J. LEWIS
Two laps down before the race had really begun.
Four days after the Rose Cup, we were back at Portland International Raceway.
Same track. Different car.
Fifteen hours of endurance racing ahead of us in the old BMW. Ross. Reno. Me.
Saturday morning, Reno put the car on pole.
And then, on the way to the starting grid, the clutch pedal snapped.
Just like that.
Months of preparation. A car on pole. Seven hours of racing ahead of us.
And we couldn't even make it to the grid.
The guys at AR went to work.
Parts came flying. Wrenches turned. Everyone moving with the particular urgency of a race happening without you.
Eventually the BMW fired.
We rejoined two laps down.
The race had barely begun and, for us, it felt almost over.
Almost.
We stopped thinking about what we'd lost and started thinking about what was still in front of us.
The next lap.
The next stop.
The next car.
For seven hours, we chipped away.
Nothing heroic.
A position here. A clean pit stop there. A good stint. Then another.
No miracles.
Just execution.
By the end of the day, we'd somehow fought our way back to second.
Two laps down to second.
Damn.
Sunday morning we started from the front.
Maybe we'd already paid our dues.
We hadn't.
Within the first hour we had mechanical problems, a penalty, and contact.
At one point, we were 44th.
Forty-fourth.
There's a moment in a race like that when you can feel yourself wanting to decide the outcome before it's actually been decided.
Today just isn't our day.
Nobody said it.
Nobody needed to.
Instead, we just kept racing.
Ross drove.
Reno drove.
I drove.
The crew kept giving us a car.
Nobody panicked. Nobody looked for someone to blame. Nobody tried to win eight hours of racing in a single lap.
We just kept solving the next problem.
Hour after hour.
Lap after lap.
44th became 30th.
30th became 20th.
Then 10th.
And with ninety minutes remaining, we caught the leader.
After everything that had happened, we were racing for the win.
We made the pass.
44th to first.
I fucking love car racing.
I've thought about that weekend a lot.
Not the win.
Not the trophy.
The part before it.
The broken clutch. The lost laps. The penalty. The contact. Watching our name disappear down the timing screen and choosing, over and over again, not to care.
Because the only thing we could do anything about was what came next.
That's something Ross, Reno and I have found together in that old BMW.
We trust each other.
We stay calm.
And somewhere along the way, we've stopped believing a race is over simply because it looks like it should be.
There is almost always another lap.
Another opportunity.
Another problem you can solve.
Racing keeps teaching me that.
The race is almost never over when you think it is.
Only when you decide it is.