Summer Sizzle Weekend at Road Atlanta

B2 Motorsports at the Summer Sizzle Regional and Club Race Experience, Road Atlanta

Thursday: Getting Set Up

In road racing you run in just about any weather short of lightning, so unloading and loading in the rain comes with the territory. This time it was a light one that rolled in right about when the ramp came down. We put our heads down, got the cars out, and got the canopies up. Nobody complained, or at least not much.

Once the last canopy was up, the paddock looked like a paddock again. The rain wasn't bad, just enough to make the setup a little soggier.

Who's Here and What They're Running

It's a big weekend for us, with a Regional race and test day running alongside the Club Race Experience (CRE). That puts drivers at both ends of the experience curve under the same tent.

Running the Regional and test day: Ryan Starck, Steve Conrad, Mark Eaton, Clark Brittingham, and Wade White. Steve is also double-dipping into the CRE. When you drive this far, you use every session on the schedule.

New Car: Chassis 641

We've got a fresh car under the tent this weekend. Mark is shaking down our newest rental, chassis 641, which we picked up by selling our TA2 Trans Am car. It's new to us, but it has some history. Scott Reddick owned it originally at Alliance Autosport, then Troy Brenner campaigned it before it came our way. It looks quick, and having Mark near the front of the timing sheet on a shakedown day is a good sign for whoever ends up renting it.

Ariv Learns the Spec Racer

The story we're most excited about is Ariv Kapadia Basu, who flew into Huntsville to start learning the Spec Racer Ford from the ground up. He's here to help the team all weekend, turning wrenches and learning how a race weekend runs from the inside instead of watching from the fence. He's also entered in the CRE to get real seat time in the car.

If you haven't run one, the Club Race Experience is the SCCA's way of getting people into wheel-to-wheel racing without a lot of pressure. You don't need previous experience or a competition license, and there are coaches on hand to walk newer drivers through it. Licensed racers and first-timers share the same track. It's a good way to find out whether you love the sport before committing to a whole season.

The SRF3 is a good car to learn in. It's about momentum and discipline, with no extra horsepower to bail you out of a bad corner. Road Atlanta teaches that lesson fast. Turn 1 through the esses will show you more in one lap than a month of reading.

Home Base

We got lucky on lodging. The VRBO has a big game room with ping pong, foosball, a dartboard, and a little basketball hoop, plus enough space that our debriefs kept getting interrupted by somebody's questionable serve. It made the weekend feel like a team weekend.

Dinner Thursday night was Johnny's New York Pizza. Nobody had a bad slice.

Friday: Test Day

Test day went well. All five B2 cars ran clean, which is no small thing when you've got a full tent of them turning laps in the Georgia heat.

The two issues we did have were the good kind, caught early and sorted out. Steve's AIM dash started throwing alarms after a firmware update, and they turned out to be false. He brought the car in rather than push through the warnings, which was the right call. Protecting the car matters more than any lap time, and chasing a phantom alarm on track is how a firmware quirk turns into a real problem.

Wade's car developed a shifting issue after a session, and it came down to two things. The gear position sensor was slightly out of adjustment, and Wade was resting his hand on the shifter, which triggered false fuel cuts followed by rejected cuts when he actually went to shift. Fix the sensor, keep your hand off the lever between shifts, and it goes away.

Here's where the pace shook out under our tent. Ryan and Mark were the two fastest cars on track and within a second of each other. Clark was third quickest, about a second back. Steve and Wade were a couple of seconds further back. Nobody's out of it, and a second is a lot of pavement to find at Road Atlanta.

That evening, after the sessions and a thunderstorm, Sterling Dement registered for the CRE. It was his first SCCA event, and signing up was easy. That's the point of the program. You get about an hour and a half of track time across the weekend through practice, qualifying, and practice races, and it counts toward a license down the road.

Back at the VRBO we fired up the grill for burgers, hot dogs, a Caesar salad, and a few beers, most of it from a single Walmart Business order that covered the weekend's groceries in one shot. The house is twenty minutes from the track and has plenty of room. All nine of us fit in the living room to watch race video and go through coaching before bed. We liked it enough that we're already talking about booking it again for Runoffs in 2027, and maybe Super Tour, Majors, or next year's Summer Sizzle.

Saturday: Qualifying

The test day pace carried into qualifying. Mark put chassis 641 on the front row with a 1:36.822, just 0.139 off the pole time set by Matthew Horst. That's a strong first impression for a car we'd owned for about a day.

Here's how our tent qualified in Qual 1:

Mark and Ryan up front was the fight the test day sheet had hinted at, two B2 cars in the top four split only by Conner Grant. Clark qualified P7 in a tightly packed midfield where a few tenths are worth several spots. Wade took P10 while still dialing in the car after Friday's shifter fix. Steve didn't get the lap he wanted, and his P11 time doesn't reflect the car's real pace, so there's room to move up once he strings a clean one together.

CRE Qualifying

Over in the CRE group, Ariv qualified P4 in his group with a 1:42.529. For his first session in the car that's a good number, and he was only 0.725 behind Steve, who has plenty of laps in one.

There's context behind that lap time. When we put a new driver in the car, we detune it by backing the throttle stop off a couple of turns to cap maximum throttle around 75 to 80 percent. It makes the learning curve easier and takes some early mistakes off the table. Once a driver is smooth and has good fundamentals, we open it back up to full power. So Ariv ran that 1:42 with about a quarter of the throttle held back.

His first reaction to the car was surprise at how much the chassis rolls compared to a go-kart. That's the Spec Racer for you. Steve's double-dip was doing what he wanted, more laps and more data on top of his Regional weekend, and Sterling put in clean, consistent laps in one of his first SCCA sessions.

Saturday Night

The best parts of a weekend like this don't show up on a timing sheet. Someone set up a target and we shot bow and arrow for a while, then sat out in the Adirondack chairs as it cooled off. Dinner was chicken thighs, sweet potatoes, Caesar salad, and mac and cheese. After that we watched race video and did some coaching, breaking the day down corner by corner, and then the ping pong and foosball came back out.

Sunday: Race Day

The CRE

The CRE isn't really a race, and it isn't meant to be. There are no trophies. What it gives a driver is the real thing on a smaller scale: track time, practice starts, real full-course yellows, and a feel for how an SCCA weekend is run. For a driver at Ariv's stage, that's worth more than any finishing position.

He was quick, though. In the CRE feature, Ariv finished third overall in the run group, with only two other Spec Racers ahead of him. By Sunday we'd opened his car up to full throttle and he kept getting better on it. We spent the sessions working on braking points and throttle application, and he's settling in fast. Put him in a bigger field and he'll be competitive before long.

The way he got there is a nice story on its own. On Saturday, Ariv had been sharing a car with Clark, which meant swapping pedals and tires between run groups. With Mark headed home Sunday, his car, chassis 641, was free, so we moved Ariv into it. The car that qualified on the front row Saturday spent Sunday teaching a newcomer the ropes.

Steve ran the CRE too and wrapped up a solid double-dip weekend, and Sterling got both his practice race and feature race done. That's exactly what a first SCCA weekend should look like.

Regional Race 2

Ryan led our group in the Regional feature with a P4, right behind the lead pack and the top Spec Racer outside the front three. He ran in the 1:37s all race and stayed in the fight from green to checker. Clark finished P8, Wade P9 after a clean weekend of steady progress, and Steve P10 before jumping back into the CRE.

Mark, our Saturday front-row qualifier, didn't get to run the feature. He had an eight-hour drive home and had registered expecting his group to run in the morning, but the final schedule put time trials in the morning instead, and it just didn't line up with getting on the road. It's a shame to leave a P2 qualifying spot on the table, but that's long-distance club racing.

We also looked at getting Cliff into a car for the Sunday race, but it would have meant another full entry fee, so that one waits for next time.

Walmart Business Behind the Scenes

Every result here has an unglamorous side to it, which is getting a nine-person team fed, supplied, and set up a long way from the shop. That's where Walmart Business does a lot of work for us.

Four days of crew meals, the grill nights, the salads, the mac and cheese, the drinks in the cooler, came together through Walmart Business, along with the things nobody photographs but every paddock needs. Shop towels and cleaning supplies to keep the cars and the work area right, and the paper goods and household basics that make a rented house work for a full team.

Two things make it fit the way we operate. Fast delivery means we're not losing setup time hunting for stores in an unfamiliar town when we should be working on the cars. And having multiple buyers on one account means different people can order what their part of the operation needs, with the spending tracked in one place instead of a pile of receipts at the end of the weekend. For a small business running five cars and a driver-development program on the road, that adds up.

Wrapping Up

We came in with a short list: shake down the new car, get our Regional drivers up to speed, and give a newcomer a real shot at the sport. Chassis 641 qualified on the front row. Ryan carried the Regional with a P4. And Ariv, who flew into Huntsville days earlier having never driven a Spec Racer, went from a detuned car on Saturday to full throttle on Sunday and got better every time out.

Want to try a Spec Racer? B2 Motorsports runs SRF3 arrive-and-drive rentals. See how Race With Us works or get in touch.

More from B2 Motorsports

Read more on the B2 Motorsports blog, see how an SRF3 weekend works on Race With Us, or learn about the Driver Development Program. Questions? Contact us, call or text 256-910-0658, or email info@b2motorsports.com.