Busy Times

Le Castellet, France (May 2, 2013) — The past few weeks have been very busy, but in a good way. I’ve been doing a lot of driving between testing in Pro Mazda and racing a Formula 3 car in France. It started at Gresham Motorsports Park, which is a very short oval in Georgia. I was testing with Team Pelfrey getting ready for our next Pro Mazda race at Indianapolis. It only takes 15 seconds to do a lap; it feels closer to a circle than an oval. The test went very well. We learned a lot and continued to improve.

Fast forward a few days and I was in the south of France, which felt a lot like England, cold and wet! I had the opportunity to race in the opening rounds of the European F3 Open Championship with Team West-Tec. I had never driven the car or the track before. Circuit Paul Ricard is about 3.5 miles long located right at the top of a mountain, just a little different than Gresham! The first day of practice was dry. We had three sessions and I just wanted to get comfortable in the car. I was in the top 10 in each outing, making improvements all the time. The F3 car is quite a bit different than the Pro Mazda. It creates about twice the amount of down force but has less power; this makes the cornering speeds very high which took some getting used to.

Qualifying on Saturday morning was in the wet. So I had to learn all over again about the car and the level of grip it had in the rain. I ended up 10th. The race started behind the pace car due to heavy fog. Once it got started I worked my way up to sixth. I was fighting in a group of cars and fell back to eighth until my battery died and I didn’t finish. Having a day in the dry and in the wet I felt a lot more confident going into Sunday because no matter what the conditions were I knew what to expect.

We started the day off much better, I qualified second for race two. It was raining again and we made some changes to the car, which helped a lot. As the start of the race got closer the clouds got darker and we thought it was going to rain again. The track was damp but everyone was still on wet tires. We set the car up for full wet conditions, expecting more rain. I hadn’t done a standing start in well over a year. I tried not to get any wheel spin off the line, which was difficult, but I got the lead. I led the first three laps but the rain didn’t come and it destroyed the tires. I fell back to fifth by the end of the race. If the rain had come it would have been a different story but that’s racing and in the end we came away with a good result.

It was a unique experience; I got to sample a bit of everything throughout the weekend so I learned a lot. There were over 30 drivers from 20 different countries in the race which doesn’t happen often.

I’m off again next week for the Pro Mazda Series tests at Mid-Ohio and Lucas Oil Raceway. I’m looking forward to getting back in the Pro Mazda car and working with the guys from Team Pelfrey.

Special Thanks to Team Pelfrey, Mockett, Mazda, Parathyroid.com, California Scents and OMP for all of their support. Also to everyone at Team West-Tec for their hard work all weekend.

Thanks for reading,

Spencer