Spec Miata at Nelson Ledges

At speed through the carousel (Photo: Bryan Bartzi)

Sorry for the lack of updates, its been a pretty hectic time of year for me! There has been a lot of meetings and work associated with the end of the school year, so I've been pretty busy.

  I've been very lucky to have a dad that loves cars and racing and I have him to thank for getting me in my first go kart at the ripe old age of seven. We started off in the 50cc class at local tracks and eventually we worked ourselves all the way up to the highly competitve TaG class at Beaverun. Last weekend I took the next step on the racing latter and got behind the wheel of a Spec Miata race car at Nelson Ledges for an SCCA driver's school.

 We had bought a "ready-to-run" Spec Miata this January and planned to have it ready for the school, but "ready-to-run" obviously means something different to different people. Needless to say, we had more work to do on the car than we had originally thought, so we managed to rent a car from a friend of ours a few weeks prior to the school.

  During my first on track session I immediately felt comfortable behind the wheel. The experience I gained from karting helped immensely, but I also feel that I owe some of my success to my time spent on iRacing.com racing simulators. iRacing seemed to really help me negotiate traffic and initiate clean and safe passes. The Miata in iRacing really did not feel like the Spec Miata, but I think every driver can use iRacing to improve their race craft and make them more confident in traffic.

On the false grid for a practice session

By the end of the second day I managed to shave 14 seconds off of my first practice session and I got down to a very respectable 1:20.6. I have to thank my instructors to providing great feedback that really allowed me to focus on areas to improve.