A fine weekend of Racing!

The most wonderful thing about Spec Miata is that if you set them up right at the shop, you can, for the most part, not worry too much about them at the track. Our shop, Track Ready Performance, maintains roughly 8 cars between events, and we do track-side support for up to 4 at each event. Our version of track-side support includes any work needing to be done to the car, short of removing heavy driveline components or major alignment, for $100 per track day.

This past weekend, we had a great time racing at Texas Motor Speedway. With awesome garage space to work in, and great company around us (John Phillips Race prep on one side, the McSpaddens on the other, Bob Stretch, Paul Keplinger, and Brad Sawyer across from us), we were able to run a rather stress-free weekend and just work on making our cars run better.

The newest toy on one of our customer cars is a Pi system2, for full data acquisition. This gives us engine parameters (oil pressure and temp, water temp, RPM, voltage) as well as driver inputs (steering input, throttle, braking thresholds). It also gives us vehicle handling information and track mapping using an accelerometer built into the dash unit. We can see what kind of G loads the car is getting on specific corners, and the driver’s input for that corner by clicking on the map supplied by the info downloaded from the car.

A slight off-track excursion coming off of the oval, after NASCAR turn 2, must have had some debris left from another car. No damage was done to our car, but it did make a curious gash in the tire.

Saturday’s track conditions were great, unless you went too far out of the racing line, and we found that by taking some of the rear camber out of the car, and a reducing our toe to practically 0 front and rear, we still had a stable car that wouldn’t sacrifice any infield handling for the outfield speed. Staying a bit late on Saturday night checking alignments from the rubbing and bumping gave us a clean slate for Sunday’s race.

Sunday brought rain. Not a down-pour. Just a drizzle that had us wondering if we should be running rain tires for qualifying. The rain stopped just before the open wheel cars went out before us. They dried the course out a bit, but they leave a rather narrow line, and there isn’t a whole herd of them. The Spec Miata run group had no less than 34 cars go out, and for the first 8 laps of qualifying, the guys (and girls) got to run in semi-damp conditions that let people explore the edges of adhesion.

There were a few, um, incidents in the race, but no-one was hurt. Everyone was having fun, and a few people were swapping the race stories that always come about after a weekend of racing like this ( “man, I had you in that turn”, “no, I had you, that’s why the paint from the back of my car is on the front of yours”). I loaded our gear, tools, and finally put 3 cars on our trailer, went home, and passed out. Cold. I was very happy the weekend was over. It was a lot of work, keeping 2 cars race ready, and helping a few others we didn’t even bring.

Silly thing is, no matter how tired I was, I was kind of getting excited already for the Regional race and 6 hour Enduro we have at Texas World Speedway on November 20 & 21.

For more information on Track Ready Performance, feel free to contact Thorage327 through our forums or directly at his shop. We look forward to hearing about your racing experience soon!

Track Ready Performance
Christopher Greene
6508 Charmaine Drive
Watauga, Tx 76148
(469) 223 3487