Edward Sevadjian wins Group 6 with gutsy strategy at SVRA CoTA
When qualifying began on Friday there were 55 cars in Group 6. Edward Sevadjian won the pole by 1.5 seconds over # 46 Jody O’Donnell in Jim Kitzmiller’s # 36 Duntov Motors Company prepared Corvette. A bevy of Porsches were another 3 seconds back.
Come time for the qualifying race on Saturday morning it was raining like mad. SVRA announced the results would set the grid for the feature race if more than half the cars showed up. Enough cars showed up so Sevadjian decided to race on a set of hand grooved Hoosier dry tires. His main Corvette challengers, O’Donnell and # 33 Mike Donohue decided not to race in the wet.
Sevadjian was immediately passed by several Porsches on rain tires and by Curt Vogt in his hot Mustang that had some special Hoosier rain tires that really hooked up, dropping Sevadjian to sixth for the feature race that afternoon.
By then the track had dried. The faster guys who sat out the wet qualifying race were relegated to the back and decided to pack it in. Sevadjian had the field covered but the hand grooved tires cost more than 5 seconds a lap. There was a lot of passing and re-passing some pesky Porsches before he prevailed at the end.
This was the final race for Garrett Waddell, ending a career that began some 40 years ago. As a token of appreciation, Duntov Motors looked after his basically street stock ’63 split window fuel injected Corvette.
Dan Reuhs in his 1959 straight axle Corvette finished 19th in Group 4
Michael Zoch in his 1991 GT1 Corvette overcame a broken tie rod to finish 10th in Group 10. Check out the incident in his in-car video.
Clair Schwendeman & Alan Sevadjian won the enduro race.
