Memorial Day Weekend @ HPT

What an awesome Memorial Day weekend it was down at Heartland Park Topeka. Great weather all weekend long with a good amount of sun, low humidity, and temps hanging around in the 70s. It was also an excellent turnout for the NASA Central & Rocky Mountain regions crossover with around 90 cars registered.

Saturday morning’s practice session went off pretty smoothly. The car was running great and it didn’t take long to drop our times into the low 1:33’s around the 2.2 mile track layout. This put us near the top of the time sheet, only behind a few ST1 cars. After about an hour break, it was time for qualifying. 2 hot laps later we rolled back into the pits with a very fast 1:32.9, placing us 4th on grid for the afternoon race.

At 3PM we rolled down to grid and staged up behind the pace car. After a quick lap around the track behind the pace car the green flag was dropped. By the end of the first lap we were sitting 5th overall after a ST2 S2000 passed us going into corner 3. While that group of 4 cars kept slowly pulling away, we kept building the gap to everyone else behind us. Included in that group was our ST3 competitor who lost a couple positions at the start and was now stuck in traffic. The rest of the race continued on without issue and saw two of the cars ahead of us retire, bumping us to 3rd overall.

Sunday unfortunately didn’t go quite as well as Saturday. The whole day we were faced with a intercooler hose coupling that decided to start shredding apart. This obviously created a major boost leak putting us way down on power. We carried on however and did the best we could for Sunday’s race to get as many points as possible.

Now its onto summer break for Team STI Guys as our next event won’t be until August at Motorsport Park Hastings. Over this period of time we will be working to finish some aero developments for the car. We will update as things progress.