July
21, 2001. Sears Point Raceway. After
a four month layoff between races, any questions of Scott Bradley’s desire to
capture the Star Mazda Series North American Championship were answered as
Bradley continued to display speed and consistency on his way to a fourth place
finish at Sears Point Raceway. With
his third consecutive top five finish this season, Bradley has increased his
lead to seven points over Chad Block.
“I
have to admit that fourth place isn’t where we wanted to finish today,”
Bradley said after the race, “Sears Point is my home track and we had a great
crowd out here from Polycom this weekend, so I really wanted to grab the win for
them, but the way the race worked out was to our disadvantage, so we focused on
stretching the championship lead.”
From
the outset of the weekend Bradley was able to display the speed of his #14
Polycom and Shames Construction sponsored Star Mazda as he placed the car at or
near the top of the charts in the weekend test sessions.
The only blip in the radar came when he experienced a broken gearbox
coming out of the Carousel corner. “I
was coming out onto the back straight, upshifting through the gears, when
something jammed and the engine had a large mechanical overrev,” Bradley said
of the incident. “It took a few
seconds to free the shifter up and my session was over.”
The
World Speed Motorsports crew quickly went to work on the gearbox and in the
final session before qualifying Bradley posted the fasted time.
“The car wasn’t exactly where I wanted it to be, as it seemed to take
too many laps to get up to speed and it bound up in a couple of the corners, but
I was able to put some good laps in when I wasn’t caught up in the traffic,”
Bradley commented.
That
traffic would come to play a major role in the rest of the weekend as the Star
Mazda Series would present one of it’s largest fields ever, 44 cars, on the
twisting 2.5 mile course. “During the qualifying session I couldn’t find a clean
space of track to put a string of laps together and wound up running nose to
tail with Chad Block for most of the session,” Bradley said. “We were a little quicker than Chad and grabbed the third
spot, but a couple of other cars that got clean laps were able to get ahead of
us.”
Bradley
had high hopes for the race, knowing that his consistency and experience on this
challenging course could give him an edge over the competition, however he
almost didn’t make it through the second pace lap as the driver joining him on
the second row, Moses Smith, almost drove him off the track coming into turn ten
of the eleven turn track. “It got
interesting there for a few seconds as he tried to move me into the dirt and I
held my ground,” Bradley said, “at one point I think we even touched
wheels.”
The
start of the race revealed another setback for Bradley, as he quickly discovered
that the overrev earlier in the weekend had taken a little out of his Mazda
rotary powerplant. Now he would
have to hope for a run of green flag laps to set other drivers up for passes,
not being able to power by them under acceleration. “I fell back to fourth at
the start as we just didn’t have the same pull from the engine and the car
still didn’t want to run free in turn three, so I was going to have to
pressure the other drivers into mistakes and gradually bring the race to me, and
that’s when people started crashing,” Bradley said.
Four
separate caution periods, strung out through the 22 lap event as drivers down in
the field struggled to come to grips with the challenging circuit, deflated
Bradley’s hopes for a long green flag run and he had to work on the restarts
to keep his car ahead of the pack behind. “The
car wouldn’t allow me to attack Moses on the restarts and I was under pressure
first from Chad then Marc De Vellis on the restarts as they wanted my position.
Fortunately I was able to hold them off, but I just didn’t have enough
to get past Moses at the end.”
The
Star Mazda Series North American Championship continues with Round Four at
Portland International Raceway on August 2-4.
For more information on the Star Mazda Series please visit www.starmazda.com.