It’s no secret that the start of our racing year didn’t go as we’d have hoped.

My karting season took 3 races for me to get gremlins sorted and to start performing at a reasonable level-once things started to click I managed to win 3 races in a row.

Our NASCAR Pinty’s Series season started in a similar fashion.  Our cars were good but we mostly started a bit off with our setups and managed to get things better at the end or we had bad luck like at our first road race at Canadian Tire Motorsports Park when practice was wiped out due to rain. We brought a brand new car that hadn’t been fully tested and, like my kart, had a few gremlins to work out.

But then something clicks.

That’s not to say that there isn’t a lot of hard work that goes into getting things turned around-of course, there is. Every race, every pit stop we put a ton of thought and work into what we need to do to make things better. Every decision feels like the right thing at that time but it doesn’t always work out that way.

Yesterday we were racing NASCAR at the Honda Indy in the streets of Toronto. Since CTMP we did get our road course car to a test session which really helped us understand what the car wanted and how certain changes would affect the balance.

Alex Tagliani (my driver) is no stranger to the track in Toronto having competed for years in Indycar as well as since 2014 in NPS, winning 2 times and chalking up many podiums. Our crew has remained largely unchanged since we joined 22 Racing in 2014 and they are all the best at what they do. One new addition this year is our crew chief Terry Simpson. While Terry is new it is as though Alex and Terry have worked together for decades, the chemistry and communication are flawless.

The schedule in Toronto is that NPS completes our event entirely on Friday. Our practice session was approximately 1 hour immediately followed by a 20 min qualifying session.

As we started practice (and as I’ve explained in previous blogs) we always start on used tires. We’re only allowed 1 set of new tires for the weekend so they need to be saved for when we start qualifying. Our car was only ok on used tires compared to that of our competition but we could see that the balance of our car was much better than that of the field. In other words-we could see that the cars in front of us were pushing past 100% to get their lap times where we were saving our stuff for when it counted.

Qualifying went well for us, we waited to go out until later in the session to let some of the traffic clear out and have a better chance that we have a clean track and not held up by slower cars. On lap 2 we posted the fastest lap and it was never challenged.

From the drop of the green flag, we were really good. Andrew Ranger could apply pressure for the first few laps of a run. Tag and Ranger would pull away from the pack but after about 3 or 4 laps Tag started to open the gap to Ranger.

There was a mid-race caution which packs up the field erased our lead. On the restart we were warned by NASCAR that Alex “jumped” meaning that he started too early. Whether he did or didn’t, I can’t say because our vantage point from the spotter stand is terrible. There was another caution on the restart lap.

During caution periods our race director Rob Sharpe will give the running order and as he read down the list had the 27 leading with us in 2nd. I assumed that he misspoke but started asking our spotter official Ken for clarification who reminded me that on track issues had to be addressed by our crew chief with the on track officials.

I called Terry on the radio that he has to talk to NASCAR but, like me, he also assumed that NASCAR made a mistake and that it would be sorted.

End of the day, we lost the lead which was the result of the wrong call being made (this can happen in live events). We managed to get back around Ranger on  the restart, pulled away and ended up getting our 1st win of the season in the Julia Gates GP, which is our 3rd at the Toronto Indy.

Now, to carry this momentum to my home race in Edmonton next weekend.