With the excitement of the new build still at the forefront my mind I was eager to do a lot of racing this week. iRacing didn’t disappoint!
Star Mazda Race Results (iRacing members only!)
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Had a good first race in the Star Mazda for 2009. The season started with a new track for me, Road America, and being a larger circuit I was looking forward to racing here. The track is nice to drive, with a good variety of corner types, speeds, and elevation changes.
19 cars took to the grid (one off the maximum grid size) and I began the race 8th, in a SOF of 2817. I had a good first lap, climbing to 5th and soon found myself in a very competitive gaggle of cars racing hard.
On lap 2 I made a mistake following someone closely through a corner (a fast sweeping right hander) where they slowed more than I anticipated and I didn’t slow enough and caused a gentle spin for both of us. I was able to press on with minor steering damage, and recovered a 5th place position for much of the race.
The only other moment of note was a gradual chase down of 4th, which was finalised with a nice turn 1 pass.
So a 4th place finish and 146 points – a great start to the season.
I made a small highlights reel of my first two laps, and my late pass to take 4th place :
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I was a bit reticent about this first race at Daytona – it’s quite a high pressure ride and crashes/incidents are all to easy to collect. I was happy that I didn’t need to work on a setup here though, as at this superspeedway it’s all about the draft and not so much the setup.
I joined a race with no qualifying time and started 11th (last). It was a pretty good race, and a lot of fun – there was an early caution on lap 10 (I avoided the crash by a wide margin but still picked up a 4x incident) and I was one of the 3 or 4 cars who pit for fuel. The rest of the race I pottered around the back, just hoping that the race would stay green to the end. Sure enough, (somehow) we ran the rest of the way under green and I scoffed when I passed the cars ahead splutter and run out of fuel and I took a good 3rd place finish, for 123 points.
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I’m also having thoughts about running a Skippy season too, but I realise that it is really unlikely I’ll put in 12 weeks of racing…. hopefully I’ll get at least 8 in but we’ll see how it pans out. The first week for the Skippy was at Infineon Long, and with a short amount of practice (10 laps or so) I was comfortably beating last seasons time by a good few tenths. I went into a race (with a high strength of field) and had a good, but uneventful race for 5th place, and 118 points.
All in all, three really good races and very high scores for week 1 (146, 123, 118)!
