Paul Kaiser came to Road Atlanta looking for another Factory Five Championship. He took home all the marbles at Mid-Ohio in 2011 and he was aiming for another. His lap times and a first and a second in the qualifying races earned him the pole position, so he was looking pretty good from the get-go.
However, NASA Great Lakes racer Paul Arnold was having none of it. He got around Kaiser on the opening laps and was ahead when the full-course caution came out due to Greg Vannucci’s crash on the front straight. Once the race resumed, Arnold benefited from John George taking the fight to Kaiser.
“In the beginning it was dealing with getting by Paul Kaiser and then when we did get clear of that, luckily John attacked him, which gave me a bit of a gap,” Arnold said. “So then, I was trying to troll, but I couldn’t. I had to keep going.”
George eventually got around Kaiser to take second place, a position he was lucky to get given an absence of mechanical luck at the Championships.
“Paul and I went at it pretty good,” George said. “I started fifth. I actually swapped out the engine this weekend, so it was a very eventful weekend for me.”
In the end, Kaiser didn’t get his second Championship in Factory Five, but he was already thinking about how he can go faster.
“It was a good clean race, a nice start,” Kaiser said. “I’ve raced with these guys before so I didn’t worry too much. The highlight of my race was how equal the cars were on the back straight. I had to run like one foot off Paul’s fender. That was awesome. It happened twice and we were just dead even. Same thing with John when he got to me. We were dead even. Cars were all equal. Those guys just outdrove me. They say I need power steering, which I don’t have. That might have helped me a bit. That’ll be the next thing I add. Maybe I can keep up.”
