Pre-race updates, work, testing
Fun news! VelocityAP in oliver installed a spare second seat in the car, and we used the friday practice times to take a 15 year old paraplegic from Chilliwack out on the track to show what is still possible with an SCI. He loved it!
Secondly: The Spin, a magazine made by Spinal Cord Injury BC, is doing a story on our race team and my successes last year. The sponsors are mentioned in it and I will be sure to get an extra copy for all the sponsors!
Thirdly: our team photographer, Bryce Chora, attended these races and got a whole handful of amazing new shots. I will share these on our instagram and in a separate post here soon.
As for new work on the car: My dad completely re-did the exhaust from the headers back. It was 2.5 diameter and had 2 mufflers. Now it was 3 inch diameter exhaust and only 1 muffler. The goal here was to give me a little more power and make it sound better. Good news was that the data showed that yes, we had more power and were marginally faster on the straights. Bad news was that it was WAYYYYY too loud. In addition to the videos now being completely drowned out by car audio, competitors and spectators both took note. Dad has since installed a second muffler back into it to tone it down. Dad also completely re did the alignment, and that benefitted greatly. the car is much better balanced now and a lot easier to toss into corners without race-killing understeer.
Practice and Qualifying
Because the fires in the okanagan were so severe and with all the evacuations in Kelowna, there was fewer people in the races than normal. I think there was 17 on the saturday. I finished 4th (!!) in practice (mainly because not everyone was trying, but also I had my best ever lap), and when everyone turned up for qualifying, I ended up 8th! That’s our first ever qualifying and we were very happy with that. I was less than 2 seconds away from pole position. That’s by FAR the closest we’ve been yet.
Race 1
Sprint Race
Feature Race
Unfortunately for anyone watching the video, the feature race wasn’t very exciting. There was still a couple very fast cars behind us, and they got through in the first lap and a half, then after that, I was in a lonely 12th for the rest of thhe race. I couldn’t catch up to 11th, and was way faster than 13th behind me. I used this loneliness to practice managing the tire temperatures – this was very valuable for me. I did my last 9 laps all within 0.8 of a second. I have never had that consistency over a 12 lap race before and I learned a lot about managing the car’s pace over a longer race.
To Summarize:
It was a tie with our best ever race weekend! We got an 8th, a 10th, and 12th. Two more top 10 finishes, our first top 10 qualifying, and a boatload more points in the championship! We are currently in tenth out of 27 in the championship and looking to do everything we can in September to hold onto that!
KSW Lawyers - Martin Racing 