The Season Has Begun

Great Falls, VA April 20 2011

The 2011 racing season is upon us and Kopp Motorsports has prepared two cars for the new season competing in the SCCA Pro Racing Playboy Mazda MX-5 Cup series and the Spec Miata class of the SCCA Mid-Atlantic Road Racing Series (MARRS).

The MX5 Cup car (left) and the Spec Miata (right)

Kevin logged our first victory of the season at Summit Point Motorsports Park last weekend in the first MARRS race, winning the pole in the rain during Saturday qualifying and then leading every lap to take the win in the feature race Sunday.

Qualifying in the rain (Danyel Torres in the spray behind)

However, our season really began six weeks ago at Homestead-Miami Speedway in the first race of the Mazda MX-5 Cup pro series. This is our first season pro racing and first race with a very new car – there’s a lot to learn.

We struggled with the chassis set-up on the car trying to get it to run well on both the banked portion of the NASCAR oval as well the tight portions of the infield. Unfortunately, we did not have the set-up sorted when the time to qualify came around and ended up 9th on the grid for the start of the race on Saturday.

We made a few more chassis adjustments before the race (that turned out to be well-chosen) and Kevin got a huge jump on the field when the green flag fell moving quickly up to 4th from the 9th spot. The top three cars were drafting together while we were running alone and unable to catch the tail end of the draft. Kevin waited for two more cars to catch up and the three then formed a second drafting pack and began to hunt down the leaders. Unfortunately, and unintentional mistake by the last car in our three car train spun Kevin and put him into a wall ending our race.

On the pre-grid at Homestead waiting for the start

The end result from Homestead is not what we had had hoped for, but we are encouraged by the fact that we ran very close to the front and would have been in the lead pack if we had qualified better. So we are optimistic as we look forward to the second race at Road Atlanta in 10 days. You can follow all the action by logging on to live timing and scoring at the Mazda MX-5 Cup series website.