Grattan Double Regional F500 Sunday race, 6-18-23

After the clutch belt failure on Saturday, and damage that we discovered to both the primary and secondary clutches upon teardown Saturday evening, we installed a new belt and did the best we could to repair both clutches (though we didn't have an exact replacement for the broken primary clutch spring, so a blue spring replaced the yellow one that was in there). It felt good enough in qualifying Sunday morning, so we decided to give it a shot for the Sunday race.

It was the right decision. Although it took a little longer for the revs to come up with the different spring, the clutches and belt survived the race and I picked up the win in my class and set a new personal best at Grattan. At this race last year, I ran a 1:24.176. In this race, I turned a 1:24.140 on lap 4, then I really got in the zone on lap 8 and proceeded to click off lap after lap in the 1:23s, setting my fastest lap of 1:23.311 on the last lap. My goal had been to get into the 1:22s or even 1:21s this weekend, but the consensus among everyone I had talked to this weekend was that the track was lacking grip. Between that and the clutch issues, a 1:23.3 felt like a pretty good result. Looking forward to taking another crack at it in August, at the Last Chance Majors.