Boersma Racing Back On Track for 2019!
Welcome to the 2019 race season, the team at Boersma Racing finally unveiled the new 2019 Time Attack car this past weekend at Global Time Attack Road Atlanta. After spending the offseason completely rebuilding the car from the ground up the team was excited to introduce the car to the world and showcase all the changes they had worked so diligently on.
With all the changes to the car, the team knew they were going to have some figuring out to do. Basically, every part had changed from the previous season. The team had focused on improving every aspect of the car, power, aerodynamics, grip, suspension, and handling, electronics, pretty much everything!
The Thursday of the event is an open test day so the team used this to shake the car down and ensure that everything was functioning as expected, there were a few issues the team had to work through but for it being the first time the car had been on track everything was pretty minor.
The team spent the evening preparing the car for the first day of competition, doing a nut and bolt check, pulling logs from the Link Thunder ECU, making changes to the traction control profiles and changing wheels/tires to be ready to attack the first session on Friday.
Friday kicked off with the threat of rain that never really materialized. The first session out for the car did not go as planned as starting his first timed lap Chris had the car unload through turn 2 which sent the car off track damaging the splitter. The team worked hard to fix the splitter and also raise and re-align the car to ensure this wouldn’t happen again. The team worked so quickly that they were able to make it back on track for the 2nd session of the day. With the car fixed for the 2nd session Chris headed back on track, only to find that there was a vibration in the car above 160km/h, the car was back in the pits and the team decided to change the tires out for the next session to see if that was the culprit.
The 3rd and final session of the day, the car headed out on track on new tires and the vibration issue was fixed. However, a new problem appeared, with the car starting to become uncontrollable at higher speeds from oscillation in the suspension, likely due to the new aero on the car. Chris managed to push through and complete a timed lap, but had to keep his speed under 200km/h in order to keep control of the car. At the end of the first day, the team was still sitting on the podium in 3rd place, not too bad considering the issues they had.
Day 3, the final day of competition again saw the threat of rain that never materialized. The team worked throughout the night trying to make changes to the suspension in hopes that they could control the oscillations that were occurring. Unfortunately, the 1st session saw no improvement. The team worked again between sessions to try and get the issue rectified but saw no improvement throughout the rest of the sessions for the day. Chris did manage to get 1 lap in, again limiting his speed to keep the car in control and still managed to crack off a 1:34.097 lap time on the cars lowest boost setting. Unfortunately, this time was just shy of getting the team on the podium but they still wound up in 4th place out of a 20 car field.
Overall the team was happy with the results given how new of a car they had brought to the track and the amount of data they were able to gather has definitely set the team up for more success in the future. The team is going to continue working and testing the car before the next event GridLife MidWest to ensure that they can put their best foot forward for this highly competitive series
Boersma is running Konig Hypergram in 18×11 et 15 front and 18×9.5 et 35 rear. The Konig Hypergram is Flow Formed.
