Lone Star Park – Texas Region Event #6

This weekend we made the haul up to the Texas Region’s Event #6 at Lone Star Park to get some last-minute seat time before Nationals! While quite a haul, it was worth the trip!

Anna came along with me and since the drive was so long, we ended up coming up Saturday. Arlington doesn’t have a whole lot going on and by chance I found out that Formula Drift was going on at Texas Motor Speedway. Just for the hell of it, we decided to go and check it out!

While drifting isn’t really my thing, it was cool to see a Pro event. Unfortunately we didn’t get to see Vaughn Gitten Jr since he had wrecked earlier in the day, but it was fun anyways. I loved this Mustang behind the Ford trailer which had a bit of race Aston Martin color scheme going on!

We showed up early. Mark Madarash, Kurt Janish, and Steve Brantley were all in attendance, so it was shaping up to be a lot of fun! Due to the bumpy nature of the site, we decided not to run the front splitter in the off chance that we wipe it out just weeks before Nationals! By the way, I slacked on taking pictures, so I’ve stolen from Steve Brantley and Dan Lantz’s pictures, thanks guys!

Mark was debuting his new engine combo and it sounded really good. Todd rode along for a run and said it was pretty stout too! Mark ended up in 1st in CP, about a half second ahead of me in 2nd place. Running 1st heat we all struggled with a dirty course, despite a heroic effort by the Texas Region folks at keeping it clean.

Kurt Janish ran in a different heat in X, but he let Peter Fehn drive his car with the rest of us in CP. Kurt ended up with the Top Time for a CP car with a 49.3, about 2 tenths clear of Janish. He ran in a later heat though so the course was cleaner – that’s our excuse and we’re sticking to it!

Steve Brantley was there as well in his super clean Firebird. The car was pretty quick and looked great!

Even on the racing line there was some direct like you can see above! Still the course was a blast and we had a ton of fun.

Todd has a string of cones and trouble out on course. The bumpy course actually loosened the hood pins and it came up on him like this on one run! Props to Dan for being quick on the camera!

At the end of the day I was able to put in a clean 50.022 to take 2nd in CP behind Mark. Our tires were feeling the gravel and grip reduced substantially as the day went on.

Despite the declining grip levels, not DNF’ing was needed for Todd to get a run in and he managed that on his last run! Todd’s best run plus bonus footage of the hood pin failure! Due to operator error, we didn’t get any footage on the side camera for Todd’s final run since we ran out of space on the memory card. To be corrected next time!

Next weekend is a little more car prep and then we’re off to Nationals!