This blog post will be shorter than usual because our race weekend ended early at Sonoma Raceway due to the Kincade fire. On Sunday morning, just before 8am everyone vacated the track to make room for it to become an evacuation center for families who were fleeing the flames. Our hearts go out to all of them and to our brave service men and women.
This meant that the final race of the 2019 Super Touring season actually took place on Saturday, October 26th. Unfortunately, we continued to struggle with brake pedal inconsistency issues and due to traffic in qualifying; Tom was only able to qualify P11 for the race (out of 16 cars). For the race, we decided to put Graham in and he did an amazing job of charging all the way to P3 in class over the course of 18 laps. Ride along with him here:
As we look back on the year, we find ourselves having finished 5th overall in the Super Touring Championship in ST4 class -- out of 30 competitors in the Northern California region. While we always race to win, we are pretty happy with these results given that the E36 was a new car for us and we had to work through quite a few issues along the way. We're proud of how Tom has progressed and how we've been able to tailor the car more to his driving style.
So, what's next? Well, we still need to solve the brake issue. We are working on some solutions and remain optimistic about the intended results.
We also have one event left with "Heidi" before the end of the calendar year: Global Time Attack & Super Lap Battle at Buttonwillow, November 16th-17th. Our plan is to run "Heidi' in full-power trim, so she'll have about +80 more horsepower (from 240 to 320) compared to when we race wheel-to-wheel in ST4-trim. The other key difference is that we aren't restricted on tire width, so we'll go up to some 295 Toyo Proxes RR (thanks, Marc and Karl) on 18x11 wheels. Also, we recently got an awesome new rear differential after the original unit broke during testing at Buttonwillow 2 weeks ago. Shout-out to Haoming from Wanganstyle for building us an awesome new unit. He does quality work with a really fast turn-around time for racers. Both Tom and Graham already had great things to say about its performance at Sonoma.
After GTA/SLB, we plan to tear "Heidi" down and get her ready for the 2020 season. Next year, we will still be competing in Super Touring sprint races, but we also want to begin focusing more on endurance racing; with our eyes set squarely on the 25 Hours of Thunderhill. Stay tuned.