To survive and thrive in motorsports you must be willing to endure incredible disappointment so you can truly enjoy the exhilaration of success. Without the experience of disappointment success is lackluster. For those of you who follow Kopp Motorsports you know we have had more than our fair share of disappointment and we’re running a good size deficit on the success side of the ledger.
This past weekend we returned to our home track at Summit Point for the 4th racing weekend of the MARRS series. We were trailing badly in the season point standings (in 6th place, over 400 points behind leader Kenny Zalner) due to the failure of the differential in Saturday’s race at VIR two weeks earlier. But, we brought to Summit a well prepared car and importantly, an always positive attitude and belief we can win any race we enter. This weekend motor racing paid us back for our commitment to the sport. Starting 6th on the grid in both the sprint race on Saturday and the feature race on Sunday Kevin quickly moved to front and won both races -- our first ever back-to-back SCCA victories.
Friday was a test day and we spent the five on track sessions working on chassis set up. We also developed a tire strategy since the track has been recently resurfaced causing an incredible amount of tire wear.
By the time the test day ended both the # 6 and # 46 (driven by Danyel Torres) cars were dialed in and ready for the important Saturday morning qualifying session. We had convinced ourselves that the chassis set-up on both cars would permit us to run a soft compound tire even though the abrasion of the new surface argued for a hard tire. 
Saturday morning our third car arrived -- # 44 driven by Jedd Fahnestock -- and we headed to the grid. By the second lap of qualifying we realized we had made a huge mistake on tires. The soft tires grained badly and all three cars were off the pace by as much as 1.5 seconds. In the 40 car field Kevin managed to claim the 6th slot, Dan 7th and Jedd 15th. Given how badly the tires performed, we counted ourselves lucky to qualify that well. 
By the time the afternoon sprint race rolled around racing luck was shinning on us and it had begun to rain. While many teams dread the rain, we love it, and the fact that it was raining meant a simple tire choice – rain tires. It took Kevin one lap to move from 6th to the front and that’s how the race ended. Jedd had a great race finishing in 6th and Danyel in 8th placing all three cars in the top ten. The weekend was beginning to look a lot better.
Unfortunately, the track was bone dry for the feature race Sunday morning. We had to choose tires and this time we choose the hardest tires we had hoping they would survive the 20 laps on the abrasive circuit.
The green flag fell on the race and within three laps Kevin had moved into third behind opposing team mates Kenny Zalner and Scott Brunk. On lap 6 both Kevin and Scott passed Kenny and were now running 1-2 and beginning to put some distance on the rest of the field. Kevin took the lead on lap 10 and Scott took it back on lap 13. With three laps to go Kevin passed Scott for the last time and held on to win by 7/10s of a second. Danyel finished a strong 8th and Jedd 14th.
Success this weekend did a lot to raise our spirits, reinforce our confidence and commitment, and move us up in the points to second. We want express our thanks to our technical partners – Piper Motorsport, King Rat Motorsports and D&R Racing for all their support and to OG Racing for their generous sponsorship.
Kopp Motorsports will be taking a break from SCCA and the MARRS series to race at Hyperfest in ten days after which we return to MARRS.
Numquam Cedere
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