Another Podium in FPUSA Rd 5, but got taken out in Rd 6 and didn’t get to take advantage of a great start
We traveled to Portland for rounds 5 and 6 of Formula Pro USA Western Championship. This was Kyle’s first time driving this track, so he only had five 25-minute sessions on Friday to learn the track and get up to speed. The field was mixed and consisted of over 30 open wheel cars of varying types and speeds — Formula 4, Formula Speed, Formula Mazda, Pro Formula Mazda, Formula Enterprise 2, Formula Continental, Formula B, Prototype 2 and Prototype 1. It was nice to be able to race against different types of cars, but the speed gap was fairly large between the fastest and slowest, so this particular grouping was a bit of a mixed bag.
Test Day
We knew we only had 5 sessions, so we had to make the most of the track time we had. The test day ended up being fairly frustrating since pretty much every session got shortened due to incidents on track that required cars to get towed off the track. Both Saturday and Sunday featured only 1 qualifying session and a race, so there really wasn’t a lot of seat time for him (and other new drivers) to really learn this track.
Round 5
There is a tight chicane at the end of the front straightaway called “The Festival” which ended up having a lot of incidents throughout the weekend. One of them happened during the opening lap of Round 5 which took out 2 cars. Kyle was able to get around it unscathed, but he lost several positions in the first lap because of it. He drove a good consistent race, moving up a total of 5 spots after the lap 1 incident to finish P24 overall, which was enough to get him back on the podium in P3 for F4.
Round 6
Kyle had a great start in Race 6 where he moved up 4 positions in the first lap. Unfortunately, toward the end of that first lap, one of the Prototype 1 cars dropped a tire at Turn 10 which caused him to move slowly back onto the track directly in Kyle's line. Kyle reacted in time to avoid hitting him, but ended up spinning out in the process which dropped him back to 29th overall. He was able to get back in the race and moved up some spots over the next 11 laps but another incident occurred away from him which resulted in a full-grid restart.
Kyle had been able to avoid all of the incidents all weekend, but unfortunately during this restart, he got hit from behind (going into the Festival), spun around, and shredded his left rear tire. That was pretty much the end of the weekend for him unfortunately. I’m thankful the other cars behind him were able to avoid hitting him head on since they were all coming at him full speed. The car took some damage, it wasn’t too bad fortunately.
We were glad to come home with a trophy, but disappointed we didn’t get to finish the second race. Portland is a beautiful track and I’m sure we’ll be back at some point. Now that he has gotten some experience on this track, he should be faster next time!
See the FPUSA Round 5-6 Event Page for full results.