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By Mauricio Ornelas Jr.
Vegas Pro-Am Round Two (Competition) Outside Road Course at Las Vegas Motor Speedway March 30 (Saturday) 9am-5pm
Considering this was my first competition since my rookie Formula Drift season, saying I was anxious to drive was an understatement. My team and I had made a few changes to the vehicle that was sure to make a difference in the cars performance. I just needed some seat time to try them out.
The team and I arrived at Las Vegas Motor Speedway bright and early Saturday morning and quickly started setting up for the day. First and foremost was signing in and making sure the car passed tech. I drove it over to tech, Ray looked everything over and it passed with no issues. We were clear to start practicing.
I headed back to the pit area to gear up and headed to the track. The first three laps out I took it easy to get a feel for the track layout. Fourth and Fifth run out I was able to power through the whole track with no major issues. As I take off for my next run I realized the car wasn’t going into boost so I drove it out and into the pits to diagnose the issue. During the offseason we had upgraded the intake manifold and a new 3-4 inch coupler had to be used and was the cause of the boost leak issue we were having.
Unfortunately it was the only size coupler we were missing from our back up couplers supply. Luckily some of our local fans and friends knew of a place that had it in stock and volunteered to pick one up for the team. So as they went to get it I pulled the old one off and cleaned up the oil which had overfilled from the catch tank. Once they were back and we got the coupler installed we had lost about an hour of practice time. There were a few minutes left in the practice session so I quickly went out and had a couple of practices runs. The car felt good but the oil catch tank issue was still present.
After the practice session had ended it was time for a quick drivers meeting then qualifying. My team and I headed out to the hot pit and prepped for qualifying. It was now my time for my first qualifying run. I did a quick burnout to warm up my tires and headed out. It was a long straight away which allowed for fourth gear entry with a quick e-brake initiation to the first right turn. I powered out in fourth to the next transition where I down shifted to third and e-braked to get out a bit wider on the track and finished the two big sweepers in third while using left foot break. I felt confident on my first run although it was a bit conservative and I knew I could make it better on my second one. I received a score of a 71.3 but wanted to improve and get a higher score. As I was exiting and headed to the hot pit I heard a noise that made me cringe. It sounded as if I had rod knock!! I drove it out of the hot pit area and straight to the pits where my team and I discovered it was. We tried changing the oil to a thicker oil to see if it would help and allow me to do my second run. Unfortunately the rod knock was too loud and we did not want to risk putting a hole in the block. All we could do now was wait for qualifying to be over to hear top 16 announcements.
After qualifying was over we headed over to top 16 announcements, where we secured 14th place with very little practice and only on qualifying run. Not too bad considering there were over 40 drivers.
We did not want to risk any more damage to the engine so we called it a day and gave our opponent a by run.
Even though it wasn’t exactly how we wanted to end the day the team and I had a great day and made our presence known. We look forward to round 3 and getting on that podium.
