Pre Season

You might be aware that the NASCAR folks are really hitting the pre-season media this week, with lots of teams doing press conferences and other media events. You can see the schedule at this link: NASCAR.   Of course for real professional race teams (unlike us), they have to worry about promoting not only themselves and their drivers, but their sponsors as well. It's all part of big business racing, and everyone wants their share of the publicity and buzz about the sport.

Over in the Formula 1 side, today is the first on track testing going on in Spain, and you can follow live updates at this link from Autosport.com at Autosport.com.  This year has a lot of major changes in rules and engines to F1 cars, so it has been hilarious to follow along as each team reveals their car in the past week, and fans are having a blast describing how odd shaped the noses of the cars are this year. Let's just say it's a huge change from last year, and with the new requirement for V6 turbo engines, reliability will be a big factor in who does well this season.

For Nixon Motorsports and our Sports Car Club of America season coming up, we've had some changes too, but nothing that a multi million dollar budget can't take care of in quick order. Well, maybe a few dollars here and there, not millions or thousands!  The big change for SCCA is that the previous Stock classes remain, but to try and allow more drivers to compete without high performance racing type tires, most of the previous Stock classes will now be called Street. The tire specifics for this year in Street category require tires to have a minimum tread rating of 140.  This means that those typically driving Hoosier competition tires will have to remain in the Stock category since their tread wear is much lower.

For the Miata, the other big change is that many years of Miata models have now been shifted from the C that we drove in last year, to E Stock and E Street by the SCCA, so Brian will be driving in the E Street category.  The Fiat will remain in G, so this year that means G Street.  No word on Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band entering autocross, but they've got the "E Street" part  going for them already!

We'll have more info on 2014 modifications to our cars in the near future as we gear up for the first event on February 22nd.