Our third stop in the 2025 Ignite Challenge season takes us to 61 Kartway in the endless cornfields of Delmar, Iowa. This event marks the halfway point in the 2025 Ignite Challenge with races 5 and 6 of the 10 total in the season, which is hard to believe given it basically just started. What this means for me is it’s now or never if I want to get back in the championship fight. The season opening-double header in Chicago left a lot to be desired, especially given I had a poor result at my home track where I should have been at the very least a podium contender. Worse yet, I would have many challenges ahead of me this weekend. Firstly, rain was on the forecast again, which served me well last year but is still a big wildcard. On top of that, I would be running without the support of Bobby Krug Racing Services due to some unexpected trailer issues preventing them from making it to the event. So back again, one man, one team, and one miracle to pull off.
I arrive at the track bright and early to set up my workspace and prepare the kart for whatever mother nature decided to throw at us. Before a single kart even made it on track, however, she decided it was time for a monsoon in the form of a thunderstorm, putting me in yet another rain-delay situation. Right as I was zipping up my tent to protect the kart from the rain, a sudden wind gust picked up the entire tent and threw it sideways across the front of my van. Unable to do anything about the situation, I seeked refuge inside of the van and didn’t emerge for a couple of hours until the storm blew over. Left behind was the mangled corpse of my tent and a soggy, muddy mess of my kart, tools, and equipment, completely soaked from hours of straight downpour. Even certain parts of the track were deep enough in water for a jet ski race. In light of my canopy catastrophe, Zach Buchanan and the people at Margay Racing were kind enough to lend me a spot under their tent for the day so at the very least I could have shelter again. And come around noontime, it was finally time to get on track.
By this point it had been sunny for a couple of hours while the crews dried the track, so it was looking like it was going to be dry for the rest of the day. This meant that, in a way, I would be learning a completely new track having not run 61 Kartway in the dry before. I was worried that the adjustment time I would need both from the driving side and the setup side would put me a bit behind the 8-ball, and unfortunately I was right. In practice I was 8th fastest out of the smaller 18-kart field, and in qualifying I was even worse falling back to 11th. So now I was in a position where I needed to be on the podium to stay in the championship fight, but I could barely break into the top half of the field, and I had no idea what I was missing.
My goal going into race 1 was to move up as quickly as I could and try to put down a good lap that would grid us well for race two. When we were sent out for our warm-up lap, we were given less than 10 seconds from when they told us to fire engines to when the official said go, which is far less than usual, so keep that in the back of your mind. We come to green the next time by and the battle to salvage the championship is on. I make up a couple of positions by the end of the first lap, placing me 9th. By now the front pack had already built a bit of a gap to my group, and with any 206 race being heavily dependent on a draft, I didn’t have enough pace on my own to get any closer. For a while it was just me and Joe Dombrosky trading positions for P9, but coming down to the closing laps we started to catch some people from the front pack who had been slowing themselves down in two-way battles. One of these people was Ken Williams. Dombrosky in front of me got around Williams with ease, but then with one to go it was my turn to size him up. Heading into the hairpin I made a lunge down the inside, somehow made the move stick, then as I’m exiting the corner, my engine shuts off. I manage to get it going and bring it around to finish the race in 10th. Now let’s return to how that session started. Remember how there was very little time between engines starting and them sending us on track? That meant I had nowhere near enough time to set the idle on the kart before going out, so it was set far too low. So when I went for a pass in a low speed corner, the engine cut out. Normally, restarting your engine mid-race in the Ignite Challenge results in an immediate disqualification, but after the officials took a second look at the penalty, they decided to change it to a 5 position penalty rather than a DQ, so I ended up dodging a bullet with that. Additionally, I talked with one of the staff members and asked them if they could give us a little bit more time before sending us on track, and they did.
Moving onto race two with a lap time that unfortunately was only good enough for tenth on the grid, all I could ask for was a miracle. The race started, I once again made up a few positions off the start, but just like before, the front pack had checked out by the end of lap 1. Unlike in the last race, however, there wasn’t anything that helped me catch up to the cars ahead, and I spent most of the 12 laps running on my own just to bring it home incident-free. In the end, 8th place is what I had to settle for, and with my results today, any hopes I had for a championship have now been washed away.
I’m disappointed, and my head has been running in circles the last few days trying to figure out how I ended up here given how well my season started racing at Norway. It could be lack of experience compared to my competition, it could be a shorter budget, it could be a lack of practice due to work schedules, or it could just be that my skill just isn’t at their level, even though I believe it is. Lots of questions, lots of uncertainty, and very few answers. One thing I want to make very clear is that my results today and the circumstances at play were not Bobby Krug’s fault, CKT’s fault, or any of the drivers or officials’ faults. Bobby’s Team could not make it because of something out of his control, and I can’t blame him for that. The CKT Engine on my kart performed just as well as it has all season long, the idle not being set right was a mistake on my end. And out of all the races I’ve done so far this season in the Ignite Challenge and Ignite Majors, this weekend I saw some of the most respectful racing I’ve seen all season from every driver, and I hope that keeps up. I may not be in the fight for a championship anymore, but I still have races to win and a statement to make before my Ignite journey comes to a close.