Chasing Championships
The summer season has included a wide range of events for Ayrton Houk and the BHR team. The first dirt race of the season was a good one. We raced at the new Circle City Raceway on August 20. The racing at Indy’s new dirt track was fantastic, with the top six cars all nose to tail and trading positions for the majority of the feature race. At the finish, Ayrton came home with a 2nd place finish, just behind race winner Jack Macenko. With 4 races remaining in the season, Ayrton holds a 47 point lead over Jack Macenko in the Kenyon Midget Championship standings. Previously in the season, Ayrton has taken wins at both Anderson and the Speedrome. Jack is always fast at those tracks, and has now shown he can win on the dirt too. 2020 champion Colin Grissom is sitting in 3rd, only 29 points behind Jack, and he is also a threat to win at every race. So with the final 4 races taking place at Anderson, Speedrome, Anderson, and US24, it is going to be a close battle for the final points championship.
After cleaning the mud from the midget, the team switched gears and swapped our fresh Honda engine in to the Piper DL7. The next race was with the FRP F1600 Pro Series at Autobahn Country Club on September 10-12. It was critical to get back in the Piper, as the busy midget schedule has kept us off of the road courses since we ran at Gateway back in June. With the Runoffs fast approaching, we needed to blow off the cobwebs, for the car, driver, and crew! This past weekend, we did just that. The FRP series offers a ton of track time against arguably the toughest jr formula car racers in the world. With our fresh engine install, we realized some issues with the cooling system (not the engine itself). And the little 1.5L Honda likes to produce its max power when running cool. So we went through a number of changes, oil cooler placement, sidepod air exits, cooling system bleeding, and radiator replacements. So for the majority of the weekend, we were fast early in the sessions when things were still cool, but would fade a bit as things heated up. But by the end of the weekend, the cooling performance was much better, and Ayrton put the added power to use, charging from 11th up to 6th late in the race. The fast guys are all so close in the series. And it was good to see that we had the pace to run with the front runners. In race 3, Ayrton’s best lap time was only 0.4 seconds off the fastest lap of the race. So while we didn’t necessarily come home with the finishes we would have liked, we do come out of the weekend with confidence in the car and powerplant. And we are happy to have resolved some issues this past weekend, and know that we will not need to deal with them at the upcoming Runoffs National Championship at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway.
We have some huge challenges ahead of us over these next few weeks. But we are excited to be in the position we are in….to have a chance to chase two championships in two very different disciplines. Time to get back to work….