The event was winding down, but the enthusiasm and testosterone levels remained high for the start of Day 6.

This morning, we departed Caesar’s Palace for breakfast at the Shelby America facility at Las Vegas Motor Speedway.

Despite the fact that no one was watching, all the front runner cars set a blistering pace as we headed for LVMS.

This morning, JP and I were once again in the Audi.

The Panoz, despite its flawless performance thus far, had suffered an air conditioning compressor failure. We decided to give that car a rest for the morning’s activities.

After a nice breakfast and informative tour at Shelby, the cars went down the street to the LVMS Derek Daly road course for a little road course action.

There were two groups on the track:

The first group was for people who just wanted to do the minimum laps to get their route card while the second group was for people who wanted to “tear it up.”

We stuck with the latter.

The Audi made hot laps with the Ruf Porsche, Hayden’s F360, the Motegi G35 and a handful of others. With Tanner Foust at the wheel of the G35, the drifting demonstration that unfolded was nothing short of spectacular. That dude has talent, no doubt.

Hayden tossed the keys of his F360 to the competent David Green (Bullrun promoter) who quickly set fast lap at 1:40. The RS4, complete with my four portly nephews on board, took second quickest time, even with the traction control on. JP took it easy on the car (and my nephews) but that did not deter us from having fun with the car. After about a dozen laps, the Audi’s brakes smoked a bit, but there was no fade whatsoever and the car had impressed nearly everyone on site.

The Bullrun copter hovered 150’ above the track to capture the action and after about an hour of this, JP and I headed back to Caesar’s to switch back to the Panoz for the run to the lunch stop (Lake Havasu).

After a short drive in the Panoz and interior temps hovering at 130 degrees, it was clear that we needed to head back towards cooler climates, so the decision was made to skip Havasu and go right to the night stop. It’s a good thing we did, because the food they served at the lunch stop was little more than a fruit cup. Hell, I’d have settled for a gas station Corndog at that point, so we didn’t feel any great remorse for bypassing what would’ve been the most tedious leg of the journey.

JP took one for the team and drove the Panoz, while I tried to stay “daisy fresh” by riding with my bosses in the Audi. At this point, we figured we were so far behind the leaders, there was no point breaking our necks…we just wanted to nurse the Panoz along fearing a bearing seizure in the A/C compressor that might’ve ended our run.

A littler more phone recon work revealed that the night stop was the W hotel in San Diego, so we headed there after a stop at the MagnaFlow shop to see if we could remedy the problem. The A/C was done, but to its credit, the Panoz soldiered on.  Other than this random failure, the Panoz had been flawless all week. In fact, down the I-5 in traffic, we got a lot of thumbs up and “what the heck is it?” comments.  We still felt like rock stars, sweat and all.

The trip to San Diego was uneventful and rolling beachside along I-5 near dusk, temps dropped to tolerable levels. JP and I remained in the Panoz while Nick and Dan chose the Audi for this leg.

The Panoz arrived in the top 10 in San Diego, despite the 1.5 hour detour and delay and quickly unpacked, showered and began re-hydrating ourselves.

Upstairs at “The Beach,” I chose to refresh myself with some ice cold Caribbean Rum.  After about 16 shots of the stuff, I remembered that I hadn’t been drunk since Reagan was President…really. This was the first real opportunity we had to unwind, and being so close to the finish, we could almost taste the event’s climax.  JP drowned his sorrows in Gin and Tonic as we both retired about midnight, the question was “who would be the most hungover the next morning.”

Tune in tomorrow for the exciting conclusion.