Its been an eventful week for the Mazda Road to Indy, for both good and bad reasons. Before we get into the drama filled soap opera that has suddenly surrounded the Firestone Indy Lights series, let’s first focus on the outstanding racing we saw at the Iowa Speedway this past weekend and amid-season new-driver announcement from Jensen MotorSport and Andretti Autosport. Racing at the Iowa Speedway The Star Mazda race at the Iowa Speedway started out much like most oval races in this series. The opening laps were an absolute…
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Mazda Road to Indy – Preparing for the Ovals
All of the various series that are part of INDYCAR and the Mazda Road to Indy program have opened their seasons with road and street courses. Beginning next weekend, though, everyone switches to oval tracks! Racing on an oval is not as easy as going fast and turning left as those who attended the USF2000 Oval Clinic earlier this month learned. This past weekend, the Star Mazda Championship, in preparation for their coming sequence of three oval races, held an open test at the Milwaukee Mile. For many drivers in…
Read MoreStar Mazda – Familiar Teams, New Faces on the Podium
The second round of the Star Mazda Championship presented by Goodyear was contested this past Sunday at Barber Motorsports Park in Birmingham, AL. The race on Sunday morning turned out to be an indicator of things to come as all three races this weekend, Star Mazda, Indy Lights, and IndyCar, would all follow the same pattern. Tristan Vautier started from pole and never looked back, leading all 33 laps of the race and taking the checkers a whopping 39.586 seconds ahead of 2nd place finisher, Nick Andries. “We knew that…
Read MoreStar Mazda – Barber Testing Results
The Star Mazda Championship Presented by Goodyear held its first open test today at Barber Motorsports Park in preparation for the season opener on the Streets of St. Petersburg later this month. For many of the drivers, it was the first time being out in traffic in the Star Mazda cars. The testing results weren’t too surprising. JDC MotorSports is a strong team, especially in Star Mazda where they’ve won the championship with Dane Cameron in 2007 and with Adam Christodoulou in 2009, and they’ve shown that they’re serious about…
Read MoreMazda Road to Indy Wrap-up: 2/6-2/12
Well, I mentioned it on the OpenPaddock.net Podcast Ep. 75, but I didn’t think things would happen so fast. We’ve had a lot of testing going on recently, and at this late date, testing isn’t solely for the cars, but is a genuine evaluation of driving talent. Think of these late pre-season tests as job interviews. With so much testing going on, it only stood to reason that we’d start hearing more and more driver announcements in the comming weeks. Well, we ended up with four just this week and…
Read MoreInside The Helmet – The Juncos Racing Quartet
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Podcast: Play in new window | Download In this episode of Inside the Helmet – Mazda Road to Indy Edition, we talk with the four drivers for Juncos Racing’s 2011 Star Mazda Championship team: Tatiana Calderon, João Horto, Martin Scuncio, and Gustavo Menezes. All four bring a unique perspective to the Juncos Racing team, and to racing in the Star Mazda Championship. They also tell us about the very unique pre-season testing program that Juncos Racing put them through this year, a three-week “boot camp” in which they went to…
Read MoreStar Mazda – Juncos Racing’s Grueling Pre-Season Testing
The Juncos Racing quartet of Tatiana Calderon, Joao Horto, Gustavo Menezes, and Martin Scuncio completed a program of pre-season testing sessions in their 2011 Star Mazda machines at three very diverse tracks: Sebring International Raceway, Homestead-Miami Speedway, and Roebling Road. The testing session was done “boot camp” style where the team went from one track to the next in rapid succession without respite for the four young drivers. This forced the four drivers not only to become more focused on their own race craft, but also gave them the opportunity…
Read MoreStar Mazda – Junco Racing Announces Its Four-Driver Lineup for 2011.
Who said anything about an off-season? There’s been no off-season this year, there’s just been no cars on track. The business of motorsport, and especially everything open-wheel, has been running at full-steam lately. Its been hard to keep up with all of the positive news and announcements. Carrying on with that theme, Juncos Racing announced the drivers for its four-car effort in the Star Mazda Championship today. Some names are familiar to those who followed Star Mazda last year, others are new, but here they all are: Tatiana Calderon, Martin…
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