A post about goals.
Those who have been following along with me for a while will recall I’ve posted about goals a couple times over the years. It started small, but years went by with goals achieved, each more ambitious than the last, and both the car and driver kept improving. Then I attended my first Superlap Battle. I realized I had built a quick Miata, but I wanted to make this little Miata something that is fast no matter what you stack it up against. I set my sights on breaking the 1:50 barrier at Buttonwillow (something a Miata had never done before) and taking a podium in Limited RWD at Superlap Battle. This year, I won the class and went 1:48.
Along the way I’ve had some amazing businesses and friends believing in these goals and helping along. Goodwin Racing has put its faith in this program and supported it in countless ways. Blackbird Fabworx made sure I was racing in a safe chassis and have been instrumental from concept to creation in many of the crazy ideas we’ve come up with. V8Roadsters made it possible for the car to have the powertrain it needs to compete on this level. Rocky’s Miatomotive has lent a hand more times than I can count. Feal Suspension put together a coilover that I could drive fast and confidently on. In the midst of this, Singular Motorsports was born. There was a time I was just racing for me, but these days the HyperMiata is about a lot more than that. There are a lot of businesses and people that I look up to behind this effort, and there are so many of you who have followed along over the years, contributing and cheering us on, these days we’re racing for all of you as well.
So, what’s next?
Re-building the car over the last two years, especially in the last few months, it was all push push push to get to SLB 2017. In the midst of that craziness, I had this funny kind of daydream idea that some day when I won at SLB I would sit back and relax. I didn’t expect to win LRWD the first year I returned, but the irony is that doing so has made me more hungry than ever to make the car faster. I can’t wait to get this next season started, to get out to the garage and start refining and improving things, to get back on the race track turning more laps and tuning.
In 2018 we return to SLB with a target on us. There’s no way to know what’s in the works in shops across the US that may be ready by next year, 1:48 was enough for the win this year but next year it probably won’t be. If you aren’t moving forward, you’re falling behind so we need to set a new goal to push towards. The track record for Limited RWD is 1:44.602, set by Cody Kishel in the seriously prepped Excelsior Motorsports C6 Corvette in 2014. That was the last year the class allowed flat bottom floors and 80tw tires, and nobody has run anywhere close to that before or since. That’s the aim. If someone else is going to take the win in 2018, they’ll need to be on pace for a new record because I intend to be.
3.881 seconds to find from this year’s time. Time to get to work.
Respecting our elders even as we strive to surpass them:
