< Back to News Home Team Sahlen has great 1st race with MAZDASPEED3

Posted (02/13/2010) -

Having only received the freshly built MAZDASPEED3 from SpeedSource at the January Test Days, Team Sahlen had a very short time to get home and prepare the new Mazda racer for the 1st Continental Tires Series event of the year.

 

With the short amount of time, Team Sahlen choose to leave the MAZDASPEED3 race car in the conveniently stock red.  The focus by the crew was to work on enhancements to the race car from what was learned at the Test Days, and the Grand American rules adjustment after the Test Days.

 

In the 1st Session of practice, Team Sahlen worked through some trial run tests with the Official Grand American Boost Monitoring system.  

 

In practice session 2, the team went to work on some set up opportunities.  Then in the same day, Qualifying occurred.  Team Sahlen struggled with a few handling issues in qualifying that placed the #43 in 32nd out of 36 in class.  Then for morning warm up, Team Sahlen tried some new handling solutions, that saw the MAZDASPEED3 closer on pace.  

 

For the race, Joe Sahlen would handle the starting rotation duties.  With the position of being in the far back of the pack, Team Sahlen chose the strategy of refueling under an early yellow caution period.  Joe drove a very steady pace and handed the #43 Mazda over to Will Nonnamaker at the 29 Lap mark under caution.

 

Will continued forward, gaining valuable development miles that would be useful for the season ahead.  But more importantly, to the task at hand, Will continued passing ST and GS class racers, lap after lap, one by one. With 4 minutes to go in the race, the #43 Mazda was in 19th place in the ST class.  Then an amazing thing happened, a more and more cars continued to have problems, propelling Team Sahlen all the way up to 13th in class.  And with one more lap, Will might have ended up in 11th, as he was gaining 5 seconds a lap on the 11th and 12th place finishers.  Amazingly, Team Sahlen also claimed 36th Overall out of 81 entrants.

 

 

 

 

"This was a great start to the season.  We came here to get valuable laps in further development of the MAZDASPEED3, and we accomplished that by running in every session, and running the entire race.  The extra added bonus was fishing in 13th spot in our 1st race with the Mazda in the very full 36 car ST field.  These points will be beneficial as the season rolls along." - states Will Nonnamaker

 

The 2010 Team Sahlen ROLEX & CONTINENTAL Tires Series Campaigns will be supported by Mazda, Mazdaspeed, HRPWorld.com, HAWK Performance, Cool Shirt, Racetech Seats, BBS, Alcon, Mothers Polish, EMCO, TheRaceSite.com, Grassroots Motorsports, Holliday Canopies, Alcon, CM Racing, Genesis Technologies, Endurance Karting, Castrol and SpeedSource Engineering.


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