{"id":166,"date":"2012-07-28T15:50:46","date_gmt":"2012-07-28T15:50:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/manifestclients.com\/teamusa\/?p=166"},"modified":"2012-10-20T11:23:18","modified_gmt":"2012-10-20T11:23:18","slug":"so-far-so-good","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/teamusascholarship.org\/?p=166","title":{"rendered":"Spencer Pigot – So Far, So Good"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Orlando, Fla. (July 28, 2012) \u00e2\u20ac\u201c It feels like only a few weeks ago I was in England with the all Team USA guys crammed in the Cliff Dempsey Racing trailer with a cup of tea trying to keep warm. It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s been a while since I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve written a blog so I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ll start with very beginning of the year. As soon as I got back from England we started working on 2012. I didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t have much of an off-season because the Cooper Tires USF2000 WinterFest started in early February, but I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m not complaining about that! I signed with Cape Motorsports with Wayne Taylor Racing to do the Cooper Tires USF2000 National Championship Powered by Mazda for a second year and everything has been fantastic so far. We won five out of six races in the WinterFest and we\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve won four out of the first five races in the main series. The team has done a great job, the car is always fast and when it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s not they know exactly what to do to fix it. So, that\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s a quick recap of what has been happening on track, now let me tell you about what I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve been up to away from the track.<\/p>\n

Like Neil, I moved houses back in February. I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m still in the Orlando area \u00e2\u20ac\u201c basically I used to live right next to Disney World and now I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m within a mile of Universal Studios. Unfortunately, I don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t get a chance to go to the parks very often! I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve also been working quite a bit; when I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m at home I work for my parents\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 company delivering furniture. It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s not exactly a fun job but it keeps me busy! Luckily I have another job that I really enjoy \u00e2\u20ac\u201c instructing for the Skip Barber Race Series. It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s fun to get back to where I started my car racing career on the opposite side of things. I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve instructed at a few of their regional race weekends at Sebring, Mont-Tremblant and Road America. I think it makes me a better driver because I really have to think about what I do in the car and the techniques I use so I can help the other drivers. It gives me a chance to analyze different driving styles from the outside, which I normally don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t get a chance to do on a race weekend. It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s a new experience and I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m happy I get to do it.<\/p>\n

My most recent adventure was with fellow Team USA Scholarship winner and USF2000 driver Neil Alberico in Indianapolis a few weeks ago. We had been talking about going to Indy to train at PitFit Training for quite a while and finally got the chance to go. I decided to drive to Indy since we were going to need a car. It took about 15 hours but my MazdaSpeed 3 ran great the entire time. I know driving halfway across the country to get my butt kicked by Jim Leo and the other trainers at PitFit for a week doesn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t sounds like the best idea but it was well worth it. Every morning we went into the gym to do various workouts. I think the worst was the five-minute interval session between the rowing machine and the simulator. The simulator was the easy part. After the first interval of rowing we both thought we weren\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t going to make it through all the sets. We recorded our highest heart rates of the week that morning! The simulator was really neat; it was one of the best I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve ever been on! The guy that owns it, Kelly Jones from RaceCraft1, has a ton of experience with simulators. He hand-builds everything from the frame to the wiring in the custom steering wheel. It was very realistic. We probably did 100 laps at Mid-Ohio so Neil and I should be on the front row there next week, no problem!<\/p>\n

Although we only spent one week in Indy I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve been training through PitFit\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s online program since the beginning of the year. It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s a very cool program. They send me workouts online and I take them to my local gym. I work one-on-one with Ben Kissick via e-mail. He explains what I need to do and monitors my progress.<\/p>\n

It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s been almost two months since the last USF2000 race in Indianapolis and, thankfully, we don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t have to wait long now until Mid-Ohio. Originally I didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t think I would have much to do during the break. I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve actually been able to keep pretty busy and have a lot of fun. Having said that, I wish there wasn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t such a long break. I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m ready to get back to racing!<\/p>\n

Thanks for reading,
\nSpencer<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Orlando, Fla. (July 28, 2012) \u00e2\u20ac\u201c It feels like only a few weeks ago I was in England with the all Team USA guys crammed in the Cliff Dempsey Racing trailer with a cup of…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":970,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[7,11],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/teamusascholarship.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/166"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/teamusascholarship.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/teamusascholarship.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/teamusascholarship.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/teamusascholarship.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=166"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"http:\/\/teamusascholarship.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/166\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1894,"href":"http:\/\/teamusascholarship.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/166\/revisions\/1894"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/teamusascholarship.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/970"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/teamusascholarship.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=166"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/teamusascholarship.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=166"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/teamusascholarship.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=166"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}