RAYHALL: VIR Debrief

What a great weekend it was for 8Star Motorsports! Let me take you through it.

We got to the track with a pretty good car, another new track for us with our PC car and we were P2 in the first free practice, which unfortunately my co-driver Luis had flight troubles and couldn’t make it.

So he took over for the whole second free practice where we made some changes, which seemed to improve the car for myself in qualifying.

The new format that IMSA ran this weekend was much better in my opinion. Instead of the configuration they ran at Kansas, they decided to make both races count for points in each and then take the average of points from both finishes.

This would’ve made the Kansas weekend a lot better for a few teams, and it puts value on the result of the first race.

We had a great car in qualifying, even with a small mistake we were able to get the pole by 1.1 seconds.

This was huge being 8Star Motorsports first TUDOR Championship pole. I was so pumped for my guys they’ve been working so hard and we’ve been close a couple of times but we finally grabbed one.

I did pound a curb pretty hard in turn 3 one lap and actually popped my rib out of place. This was pretty painful but I knew I could put up with it through the race, I was actually excited for it to be only 45 minutes this time!

Going into the race I knew that Virginia International Raceway is a tough place to pass at so that gave me a bit of confidence starting on the pole.

We had a pretty straight forward race leading green to checkered besides for the last caution.

After we restarted the race there was a car that left a ton of debris in the esses, which we go through flat but not this time there were parts everywhere. I had to brake and downshift to maneuver through the wreckage and got really sideways coming up the hill due to being off the racing line.

It was so great to finally get a TUDOR Championship win for 8Star Motorsports then we ended up coming away with two because Luis led green to checkered in Race 2 as well.

It was a picture perfect weekend, from the pole to the two wins! I’m so proud of my guys, they’ve worked so hard for this!