Since the we began planning our 2012 racing schedule in late last year we had one weekend circled on the calendar that we were all looking forward too, May 11-13th, 2012. The weekend of Global Time Attack and Formula D Round #2 came to the east coast at the beautiful 2.54 mile world class race course, Road Atlanta in Braselton, GA. This was a huge event for us because this series is what we built the car for. Global Time Attack is the pinnacle of the American Time Attack series and is the biggest stage for our form of motorsport. Featuring some of the fastest cars and talented drivers, GTA is the real deal. Along with GTA racing the full course Formula Drift was also running its event alongside ours, using turns 10a and 10b. We even shared the same inner paddock as the pro drift teams and damn are those some impressive cars. All of the vehicles on the property were badass and the moment we pulled in we knew it was going to be a good weekend. This blog post may be a long one because our weekend wa very eventful but in to keep your attention span check out this 20 seconds of bad ass-ness that is GTA!
Global Time Attack runs all over the country in a 7 race season with classes for each drive train platform (AWD, RWD, FWD) and 3 levels of classes (Street, Limited, Unlimited). The SOHO Motorsports G35 could have run in Limited be opted to run the stickier Hoosier tires which forced us to run with the Unlimted class. With GTA being the biggest series we run in our number has officially changed from #144 to the much better #44 and our number placards are now GTA official numbers.
The competition was no joke on Friday and Saturday, there were dozens of some of the fastest Time Attack cars on the country and the SOHO Motorsports G35 was right up there with them. The race weekend was setup with 4 sessions on Friday and 3 sessions on Saturday. Racing started bright and early Friday morning and after the first session my familiarity with the course paid off and I was at the top of the lap time charts after everyones first 20 minutes of track time. As they day went on some of the well funded Unlimited teams like Jeff Whesphals GST Impreza and Chris Rado's Scion jumped to the top of the chart with a time that we were never gonna touch, even the Porshce GT Cup Car in our class was way too light and balanced for us to catch him in his Friday best of 1:29.76 to our Friday best of 1:36.63. After a few easily managed issues we left the track Friday night feeling confident and 2nd place in our class and 6th overall. Saturday couldn't come soon enough!
Early Saturday morning the weather was perfect for racing and setting fast lap times. With rain looming in the near future we wasted no time getting on track and going full sail. Between Session 3 on Friday and Session 1 on Saturday we made a compression and rebound adjustment to help the car plant a little bit and when I went out I immediately noticed the difference. Nik's magic touch on the suspension worked perfect and the car was much faster. Along with the car handling great I was driving the car as hard as I could and driving a near perfect line. The combination of the setup and hard yet smooth driving got us our fastest lap time of the weekend on the 4th lap of the first session. As seen in the video below the car was on rails and the line was great, enough to get us a 1:34.36 lap time, solidifying us in the top 10 overall and on the podium for Unlimited Rwd.
With only two more sessions left in Round 2 of Global Time Attack we got slightly greedy and wanted to see if we could beat our best lap time. In session 2 after multiple hard laps I pushed the car too hard as rain began to fall and sadly I lost traction in turn 7 leading to the straight and wrecked the car into the safety wall at over 100mph. Although I walked away with just a sore back, the car did not hold up quite as well as me. All of the safety devices in the car surely saved my life but the car's frame is too far bent beyond repair. As sad as it is to have to move on, we won't be going far. The car will be rebuilt as another G35 and will look nearly identical, except this time it will be lighter, stronger and faster. Be sure to watch all of the videos from this weekend and be on the lookout for rebuild updates on here and www.sohomotorsports.com and KPR Facebook
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