In Turn 1 during night practice.
We started the week of Petit Le Mans at Road Atlanta with rain during the promoter test day – talk about foreshadowing for the week ahead!
The test day goal for me was to work with the Global Mazda MX-5 Cup cars, showcasing the cars and utilizing them for drafting while on track with the Battery Tender Mazda MX-5 Cup Series. It was a prelude to the Global Cup car’s pricing announcement on Thursday.
We managed to have a sunny day on Wednesday, which was the first day of official practice. We drove the MX-5s again and continued to do further testing – we haven’t done much testing with them over the past couple of months, and this was a new track that the cars hadn’t been to yet, so it was an opportunity to further develop the package.
With the pricing announcement on Thursday, Mazda received an overwhelming amount of positive feedback about the price point of $53,000, with orders flowing in the rest of the week. I can tell you that it’s going to be an exciting 2016 season here in the U.S. for the Global MX-5 Cup Series!
Entering the Esses.
I focused on driving the Mazda SKYACTIV Prototype for the rest of the week. Our first practice session on Thursday morning was dry, so we were able to get our initial impressions of the setup. It was a very encouraging first session – the car felt really good and we were pleased with the progress we made during the first hour.
The afternoon, though, was a different story because it started raining and continued to rain throughout the rest of the weekend. We knew it was going to be important to optimize our rain setup, and the first time we hit the track in the rain was actually during night practice. It was one of the most daunting driving experiences that I can remember! It was a real task to navigate that track at night in the rain while trying to continue fine-tuning the rain setup! There were a lot of exciting moments, but both cars were intact at the end of it.
Even the side windows were fogging up during the race!
It was still raining during Friday’s practice, and we were better able to prepare for a lot of the small details you need to consider during a rain race: electronics, visibility and other facets that are affected by wet weather.
The forecast continued to be bad for Saturday’s race, with up to four inches of rainfall predicted. We knew we had a big task ahead of us. I started the race with a lot of variables – it was hard to anticipate how much track conditions might degrade, how often we would be under caution, and how our competitors would perform in the conditions.
For our Mazda SpeedSource team, we were able to come out of the race unscathed, which was better than most teams fared. With the shortened race distance due to the conditions – like the rivers flowing down the Esses – we were able to put the cars away unharmed and start thinking about our 2016 testing without adding to the crew’s work load.
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