Aluminos, Inc.

As the year progresses, any driver, mechanic, or team strives to improve reaching a point where all the pieces of the puzzle link together and positive progression is achieved with each continuing race. Motorsports is an amazingly dynamic environment that challenges it’s participants with a multitude of ever changing factors keeping everyone on their toes as they strive for victory or personal bests. It’s these results in the heat of competition that are the key indicators of progress as to how well the hard work and dedication that is being put forth is on the right track or not. For Team Aluminos, as they enter the home stretch of the ProKart North and South regional season, its team performance at the recent ProKart Challenge North race was stepped up as the progression of the year builds toward the championships and eventually the SKUSA SuperNationals.

It was a very successful weekend for the Team Aluminos squad as they contested the sixth round of the ProKart Challenge South program at the Santa Maria Karting Association circuit in Santa Maria, California. Six drivers flew the Team Aluminos colors on the weekend with a number of them putting in some of their best performances of the 2009 season. A number of fast lap honors and battling for victories highlighted the event for the Danville, CA based program and it was Jeff Smith’s win in S4 that punctuated the weekend.

Smith came into the event not having won a feature race but his consistency kept him atop of the championship standings. He narrowly earned 10 bonus points for the fast lap in qualifying, missing out on the pole position by just 0.032-seconds. Once the racing began however, Smith put himself into the lead and would go on to win both heat races unchallenged. A slow start to begin the feature put Smith back to the third position as they came around to the line for the opening lap. The next time by, Smith was up to second and a lap later regained the lead reestablishing himself as the man to beat. From there, Smith put down the fast laps of the race to extend to a two-second margin of victory, his first of the season.

Team Aluminos contested the first ever running of the West Coast Shootout, which matched the North and South programs of the ProKart Challenge together at the Buttonwillow Raceway Park in central California. Many of the top racers from across the West Coast converged to the event with Team Aluminos drivers looking to emerge as the top pilot in their respective class. Fernando Diaz accomplished that feat as he earned top honors in the G1 category.

Diaz began the event third in the order after the timed qualifying session, just 54-thousandths off the fast lap, ensuring he and the rest of the Aluminos staff would have to put in the extra work to gain the top spot. Able to gain one spot at the start of the first heat race, Diaz put his GP machine on the bumper of the leader. The two were evenly matched once again, running a fast lap with five-hundredths of one another but Diaz would settle for the second spot. It was a similar scene in the second heat race with Diaz attached to the leader once again, unable to make a pass for the lead. In the feature, Diaz got the holeshot once the green flag was displayed and established a small lead. That advantage disappeared near the half-way mark, resulting in Diaz putting down the fastest laps of the race to earn his first feature win of the season by a one-second margin.