Welcome to Southern California Chapter for the National Auto Sport Association. Here you can find all the information necessary to get on track at our events.
SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA REGION
2020 Season Schedule
February 15/16 – Chuckwalla (SoCal Points = AI, ST, SE46, SE30, 944, SM, TT)
February 29/March 1 – Willow Springs(WERC/TREC Only)
March 7/8– Buttonwillow (Comp School Only)
March 14/15 – Auto Club Speedway(Season Awards Banquet)
April 18/19 – Buttonwillow
May 16/17 – Auto Club Speedway
June 13/14 – Buttonwillow
Sept 10-13 – Utah Motorsports Campus(National Championships)
Oct 10/11 – Buttonwillow
Buttonwillow Raceway Park welcomed 14 Spec E30 teams to the NASA SoCal season finale. Typical for SoCal Spec E30, it all came down to the final race for the SoCal regional championship with two-time regional second-place finisher Andrew Clark going head to head with three-time regional champion and National Championship podium finisher Steve Stepanian as they came into the weekend dead even in the points chase.
Ironically, while the two seasoned veterans duked it out for top honors, the battle for the remaining regional podium spots were fought by two relatively new drivers to the series, Forenz Arabian and Mickey Miller. The stage was set for an epic racing weekend under near perfect weather conditions.
Right from qualifying Saturday, Clark showed he was not playing around by setting a qualifying time that shattered the Spec E30 track record by almost 2 full seconds! J. P. Cadoux of the NorCal Spec E30 racers
Dan Rose’s Z3 M Coupe was one of the first in the country to be fitted with a GM LS powerplant, and it’s one of a few in Time Trial competition.
The General Motors LS V8 architecture has been finding its way into cars from and on every continent. It tucks neatly into so many engine compartments, makes such ample power and is so abundant that there are prefabbed kits that will cross-fit an LS engine into nearly anything.
However, when NASA SoCal Time Trial driver Dan Rose was attempting to fit an LS2 6.0-liter into his Z3 M Coupe, to his knowledge, there was only one other car in the country that had the swap, and all of it was done the hard way, by trial and error, hand-selecting parts and troubleshooting problems as they developed.
Now, Rose had gone through two S52 engines in his current car before he resorted to
This particular start took half a lap to settle into race rhythm. NASA Prototype driver Chad Plavan diced through in-class and out-of-class traffic during the NASA SoCal event at Buttonwillow Raceway in June. Plavan got alongside NP01 driver Francis Hu heading into the Bus Stop, but couldn’t quite get past. When Hu tried to pass on the outside of a Porsche 911 going into the fast, sweeping Riverside turn, Plavan dived to the inside and squeaked through while not trading paint and somehow managing to keep all four wheels on track. Nice.
The post Chaos Theory appeared first on NASA Speed News Magazine.
Coming into the last race of the NASA SoCal season, the points race had come down to Ryan Pond, Hannah Grisham and Blake Minasian. Pond had the points lead, and he did take both wins at Buttonwillow, but after the points drops, Grisham emerged with a slim 10-point margin and the NASA SoCal Spec Miata championship.
The grid filled in with 20 competitors for the last race on the SoCal calendar. Pond had the fastest lap in qualifying, which netted him pole position, followed by Eric Slivkoff, Blake Minasian and Rob Burgoon. Grisham had some mechanical issues right before qualifying began, and she started from seventh.
Pond had a good start and was leading Slivkoff and Minasian, but four laps in Jerry Baxter had contact with tire wall on the front straight, which brought out the full-course caution for a couple of laps. At the restart, Burgoon used it to get around