Since the new season is upon us and I’ve officially joined the Prima Racing team, I thought I would give some background about myself.  I met Andrie about 10 years ago in the San Francisco Bay Area car circle.  We both owned the same type of cars and saw each other at track events.  After months of making fun of each other (mostly about how slow the other person was), we started to coordinate our schedules so that we would go to the same track events together. 

Fast forward a few years to 2003, when Andrie and I both started to race competitively.  Andrie chose Honda Challenge while I took up Spec Miata.  In 2005, we both raced in U.S. Touring Car (Andrie in a Honda Civic and me in a BMW 328).  The highlight of that year was the exciting inaugural San Jose Grand Prix where we ran as high as 4th (Andrie) and 7th (me) before crashes late in the race claimed both our cars.

This year, I’m looking forward to teaming up with Andrie and the entire Prima Racing crew, learning more about racing and improving my skills at driving a FWD race car, and generally having a good time with the team.  If you see us at the track, we hope you’ll stop by our paddock area and say hi.

Firstly, I must apologize for being tardy in updating my blog. We got very busy and it all started in August when we blew up our newly built World Challenge engine. From then on, we had a very tight schedule. With races after races only a week or two weeks apart at most. The preparation had really kicked my ass.

We still wasn’t sure of what the cause of the blew up in August. I do think there is a strong possibility that my 02 sensor was failing during tuning and we’ve been running lean. The pistons was sent to the lab but the result was inconclusive. Read the rest of this entry »

Prima Racing captured the 2009 USTCC Championship with another win in the season finale.  This win was their 5^th win of the season and makes it one of the most dominating season by any team with 5 wins out of 7 for the season.

The Prima Racing team of Hartanto/Lepper led the championship by a comfortable margin and only needed to finish in 6^th place to capture the championship.  However, being the competitive racers that they are, they were not satisfied with just sitting back and cruising to the finish to take the championship.  They went out to win the race and fought the entire weekend to take the win and capture the championship in convincing fashion. Read the rest of this entry »

It all came down to this. After two years of absence, the Prima Racing/RedZone Performance team is back at Monterey Raceway Laguna Seca for Speed World Challenge. The majority of the year up to this point was spent running the car and trying to fine tune it for its debut at this very event. But with the past few race weekends full of engine breakdowns, suspension failures, and trouble shooting of one problem after another, it was safe to say that the team wasn’t sure if the car was going to cooperate. Read the rest of this entry »

We were at Miller Motorsports Park in Utah for Round 5 of Nitto tires USTCC race. The race track presented a challenge for most competitors, since this is the first time USTCC visits Miller Motorsports Park and a first for most competitors. Team Prima Racing/RedZone Performance consisting of Hartanto and Lepper are leading the championship points, followed closely by Andy Chittum of BTM Motorworks and Curt Simmons of Team Dodge in 3^rd.

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Cool night picture

I’m skipping the race report this month as we are not concentrating in Honda Challenge this season, and we are using it to test for World Challenge. The objective of this test, is to try several options that are presented to us and see which one is more advantageous to us. We come fully prepared and brought all our equipments, including setup pads and scales.

All that went to shit really quickly. The first lap on the warm up session the car went kablamo.   We haven’t even got to push it yet, as I was keeping the rev in check until we know for sure everything is ok.  We didn’t bring any spare engine, as this is a brand new engine.  In the effort to make the swap as quickly as we can, we split up duties among the crew.  Wayne heads the engine removal process helped by Ken and Chris.  Me, Jimmy and Jeff went back to RedZone, which is 2.5 hours away to pick up the engine.  Unfortunately we weren’t able to finish in time to make the day race.  Our entire plan for the weekend pretty much went down the drain. Read the rest of this entry »