Pakistan Express Racing Team

An oldie, but a goodie!

Short version: 18th to 2nd in five laps. Set fast lap of the race by more than 0.5 seconds.

Long version: Following Friday’s epic performance in the rain (crash excluded), we spent most of Saturday in a secret, underground lair of autobody repair often used by the infamous TC Kline. We didn’t make it back to the track until after practice and qualifying, but did manage to convince race officials to grant us hard luck practice prior to this race. Unfortunately, while waiting in the false grid we discovered that the engine wouldn’t rev beyond 4,000 rpm, then missed the session and successfully traced the problem to a dislodged chip in the ECU. We made it to grid on time for the race and this video pretty clearly illustrates what happened.

2008 NASA Championships Saturday Race from brianmakse on Vimeo

Team leader and resident Pakistan Express rain hotshoe takes 786 on an impressive run–until one of these aged racing cars drops some oil on the track.

2008 NASA Championships Friday Race In The Rain from brianmakse on Vimeo

All weekend, live timing and scoring is available at http://www.drivenasa.com/liveresults/

Finally, on Sunday, live web coverage of the 2008 NASA Championships is available at the official site at www.Speedcasttv.com

We had a brilliant practice session, with our own rain meister, Faisal, totally dominating the session by being 3.5 seconds faster than the second place car. Qualifying was a bit of a fiasco, however. The pregrid was a mess and, despite lining up for qualifying in 6th position, the race director and grid chief had no control over the situation. As a result, a few cars got caught out and we forced to start the session from the back of the grid. A handful of cars managed to get clean laps, while we were mired in a bunch of slow cars. Needless to say, we did not get a clean lap and ended up with 7th spot on the grid.

The good news is that our garagemate, GBMS, rolled around the course with speed good enough for 4th on the grid. Follow live timing and scoring later this afternoon via the link below.

OK, what is it with Miatas and their obvious dislike for our sweet lil 786 race car?

Our tire engineer, Jay McHeatgun, prepped us a set of freshy Hoosier R6s for our second session today. The prepped tires were good to go from the get go, so we took that advantage and hauled butt right out of the proverbial pit-out gate.

On our way through, a bunch of Miatas entered the track and one rocket scientist, as you’ll see, had perhaps the wrong idea.

Enjoy this clip and a great example of the brain trust that makes up the Spec Miata class:

We just finished our first practice session on day 1 of the NASA National Championships. We thought we should show you what our new camera system looks like.

This clip illustrates one of the quicker laps of our scrub session. Enjoy!