Gateway International - 2nd Place TTS

The 2010 season is officially underway!!

The weather was absolutely perfect for racing this past weekend at Gateway International Raceway in St. Louis. High temps in the mid 60's and nothing but pure sun.

This was the first event of the season for the NASA Midwest Region.

Turnout for the Time Trials group was very low, but that was kinda expected being that this was the first event and given the location. Many people either did not want to make the drive all the way down there or were too chicken to run the "ROVAL". Anyone unfamiliar with the term ROVAL, let me explain-at this particular track we run on both the oval and also the infield road coarse.

The goal for the weekend was to keep the car in one piece and slowly find out what kind of lap times we could make the EVO turn. Much still needs to be learned to take advantage of the 3 way shock setup on the car.

On Saturday there were 3 competitors in the TTS class. Jeff in his Evo, as well as a Z06 Corvette and a new Nissan GTR.

Lap times for the Evo were slow starting out, but that was to be expected since this was the first time being at this track. A continual progress was made of knocking off an average of 2 seconds per lap each session through the day. In only the third session of the day the Corvette pushed too hard and put it into the wall, ending his weekend. Thankfully he was OK and was not hurt. The lap time he had put down in the prior session however would be good enough to take 1st place for the day. Jeff took second and the GTR was in third.

On Sunday, another EVO joined the field after moving up to TTS class from TTB in order to have a chance in getting a chance at some tire contingency since at least 3 competitors have to be in the class for Hoosier to pay out. Since there were only 2 in TTB he made the move up. This created a funfilled day of back and forth with who was in the lead. In the fourth session of the day Jeff came out ahead by only .013 seconds. With only one session left to go, it was going to be a fight. Unfortunately the track conditions deteriorated quite a bit from the amount of rubber that the race groups had laid down through the day. Jeff ran a slightly slower lap in the last session, while Nathan was able to turn one lap just a bit faster and take home first place. The competition was fun and made for a great day of pushing the car to find out what improvements needed to be made before the next race weekend.

2 days and 2 second place finishes. Not too bad to start the season. More pictures to follow as they are posted up on the NASA site.