For a holiday weekend, there sure wasn’t a shortage of racers available. Team Johnson showed up first and got in a bunch of laps before Team Maddox arrived to heat things even more.
Mostly hotlapping and practice with Madeline Johnson having the most laps in practice. As expected, the practice and hotlapping got a little boring and many wanted to do some actual racing. So we setup a race with all six drivers, full rotation, no fueling, and 20-lap heats.
With juniors and adults in this one, it was going to be a team race between Team Johnson and Team Maddox. Racing with juniors is always interesting, especially with this bunch. Team Johnson had two junior drivers, Team Maddox had two junior drivers. So, one adult driver and two junior drivers for each team.
To make it fairer, we set the max lane voltage to 12v instead of 15v. The juniors could decide what voltage they wanted to run. The younger juniors settled on 9 or 10v. It was an IROC race using Jag Hobbies Augoran TR-3 cars, only slightly modified cars but fast and stuck.
With only one marshal to support the whole track, we had quite a few yellow flag situations but it worked out pretty well and everybody finished!
Superstar Junior driver, Abe Maddox bursted into the lead early on, leading the race for the first two heats with Jared Johnson a very close second. In the third of six heats, Jared took over the lead in the race and kept it from then on. In the fifth heat, Abe seemed to have trouble and would lose six laps to Jared. After the first two heats it looked like the boys were going to dominate things with Abe, Jared, and Mathew Johnson comfortably in the top three spots.
Shaylin Maddox was having none of that and fought hard to get into third place through heats 3 and 5 and looked like she was certain to hang on to the final podium spot. In an amazing performance, Madeline Johnson would win the fifth and the final sixth heat, catapulting her ahead of Shaylin and bagging the final podium spot in a very hard-fought and chaotic race.
Wow! A very impressive performance by everyone. Very cool to see the junior drivers focus so well and take advantage of opportunities to improve their results.
In the end, even though he would finish the race with the hardest car and one of the hardest lanes (red), Jared remained focused on the task at hand and held onto his solid lead, taking the checkered flag ahead of hard-charging junior, Abe Maddox. Shaylin Maddox narrowly missed the podium by just one lap and one point.
| Place | Name | Laps | Points | Total Time |
| 1 | Jared Johnson | 115 | 85 | 1038.928 |
| 2 | Abe Maddox | 110 | 72 | 1049.459 |
| 3 | Madeline Johnson | 93 | 60 | 1055.91 |
| 4 | Shaylin Maddox | 92 | 59 | 1060.096 |
| 5 | Matthew Johnson | 61 | 38 | 1144.309 |
| 6 | Grace Maddox | 69 | 34 | 1073.986 |
Awesome track day! Thank you all for supporting Stewart Raceway, especially on a holiday weekend!
Next Saturday is round 4 of the 2023 50/50 Xtreme Series. Right now I don’t have enough confirmed RSVPs for round 5, so round 4 could be the finale, we’ll see what happens.
Okay, shut up and drive!
Even though it wasn’t an “official” race Saturday, track records were set on all six lanes by Shaylin and Abe Maddox, and Jared Johnson. We just started running the new “Fast Esses” road course and hadn’t yet run the Jag Hobbies TR-3 Augorans. Consequently, the below records were set and will be the times to beat when running the TR-3 at 12v.
Jared was the fastest at 5.488 seconds in the Orange lane. Both Shaylin and Abe tied for second fastest at 6.200 seconds. Abe’s record was set, of course, in the Green lane, and Shaylin’s was in the more difficult Blue lane. Jared’s fastest lap of 5.488 seconds is very impressive considering the fastest lap on record for the TR-3 Augoran was in the Green lane by Jordan Walker on the SR3 Straight road course running 15v.
That sounds like a bug? 5.488 seconds at 12v? Or is that the previous record at 15V?
I don’t know, Shaylin clicked off a 5.766 in the same lane. Maybe that’s a new trick to try, nothing in the rules says you can’t run a lower voltage.
I was just wondering what the old fastest lap record was. You mentioned it was in the green lane, but I was just wondering what the time was.
The last race we did with the Jag Augoran platform was Nov 4, 2023 on the same “Fast Esses” course. We ran them at 15v and the record on the Orange lane was 5.254 set by me.