The season opener of the Redline Time Attack series, held at Buttonwillow Raceway Park, kicked off to a very eventful weekend! With a test and tune session held on Friday, practice sessions held all day Saturday, and two rounds of practice on Sunday, crews had their hands busy making adjustments to their vehicles to make the quickest times. HB Speed’s Jon Drenas and Danny Heng were still unsure if the team would compete as the 2008 Mitsubishi Evolution X was still strapped onto the dyno finishing up a tune on Thursday night! With the help of their COBB Tuning Accessport, the team  squeezed every little bit of additional power from their Forced Performance “Red” turbo-charger, a tubular exhaust manifold from CBRD Speed Factory and new Deatschwerks 1500cc injectors! Wrapping the tune up that night, the decision was made to run in the season opener early Friday morning via text message.

The team was forced to make significant changes to their suspension setup due to the new minimum ride height rules. To further complicate matters, the splitter shed some parts on the drive up from LA to the track. Jon was able to fabricate new mounting hardware at the COBB Motorsports trailer, track side! Jon also discovered that their cat-pipe had fouled during practice. Once again, a quick track side fix enabled them in install a replacement, but smaller, catalytic converter and get the car back out on track.

Knowing that there was a significant power loss from the modified cat pipe, Jon went for it. The first lap came in at 1.58:1, leading in to a very competitive race against the clock. Jon decided the new ride height could easily handle a little dirt/rally action during the third lap while passing COBB Tuning’s Cameron Benner, and despite kicking up a dust cloud and having his teammates skip a few heart beats, pulled away from the cloud and still managed to bring in a lap time of 1.59:8! Exciting racing, capped off by an exciting weekend! HB Speed and Jon secured the lap time of 1.58:1 and used that to finish in 2nd place in the Street Tire AWD class! Proving once again that AccessPORT-tuned vehicles are motorsports-grade. Steven Ruiz, driver of the StopTech Mitsubishi Evo X placed 1st with a time of 1.57:5 and Cameron Benner, driver of the Cobb Tuning Motorsports Subaru STi placed 3rd with a time of 1.58:9.