The “Underdogs” of LIC Motorsports are back in action this year with their Subaru STI racer for another season of Time Attack, this time in the Global Time Attack championship! The crew took part in the inaugural event on May 20th-22nd at Willow Springs Raceway in Rosamond Calif., and came out swinging with a lighter car and new and improved livery!

Last season, the team ran in the Redline Time Attack series and took 2nd in the AWD Modified class after a hard-fought season. This year, the team is back with their AccessPORT-tuned STI and a new driver to challenge this brand new series. Russ Warr took to the helm of the car in the AWD Limited class and drove to impressive 1st and 2nd place finishes after the team worked to get the car ready and on the track at the last minute, in true LIC fashion!

With just five weeks to go before the first event, the car went on a diet, losing as much sheet metal in favor of lightweight dry carbon as possible. Next, the front and rear hubs and rear rotors were swapped for more lightweight components. Finally, Lexan was installed in the rear windows for even more Lose Weight Exercise savings.

After driving through the night to get to the event, the team decided that a little shakedown would be in order to get Russ familiar with the car and to make sure everything was running properly. The Friday practice went off without a hitch, save for a broken windshield from some track debris that was quickly replaced. With the car ready to race, the crew turned their attention to getting ready for the main event!

Saturday saw Russ getting more acquainted with the car after not having competed for over a year. However, Russ is an experienced Subaru pilot and soon had the car clocking 1:25 minute lap times which put the team into 2nd for their class. On the R-compound tires, the team would hover around the 1:25 mark which put them solidly in 2nd. This gave them a 2nd place for the Saturday round giving the team their first podium finish of the weekend!

“Saturday was uneventful for the most part, Russ Warr (Driver for LIC), was just getting acclimated to the car and being in the driver seat again,” Said LIC co-owner, Noah Levy. “Russ had not driven on track or in a race car for just about 1.5 years prior to this event, so he needed to come up to speed and quickly. Russ was able to get his lap times down to a 1:25.943 for GTA and as if that wasn’t enough we were having him pull double duties and running in NASA’s time trial racing circuit. We were entered into TTR, which is fully unlimited vehicles and crazy built machines, for example Chris Rado with WORLD Racing was running his FWD Scion in it. The crew took a 2nd place win on Saturday running R-compound tires in TTR and closed out the day and got prepared for Sunday’s race schedule, which was to be as chaotic as the previous day.”

With Saturday in the books and the decision to run two classes, the team threw on some aggressive and sticky tires and took on the unlimited, crazy horsepower TTR class. The team was able to knock 2-seconds off of their lap-time and capture a first place finish!

“Sunday everyone awoke to pretty hefty winds and a very cold early morning track, this was expected according to the projected forecast,” said Noah. “LIC continued to push on and better their times throughout the day, constantly doing a tad better and only with making small incremental changes to the car. LIC finished out the GTA event with a time of 1:25.423, which was good enough for a 2nd place win in the Limited/AWD division. When it was time for TTR, LIC decided it was time to fight a fair fight and threw on some Hankook Z214 C91 tires to go attack the class and see if we could better there times over the inferior r-compounds from the day before. With only 2 laps to get it done, we were able to pull off a 1:23.136, good enough for a 1st place finish.”

At the end of the event, the team had completed over 60 laps of a very demanding track, with three podium finishes (2nd on Saturday and 2nd and 1st on Sunday) to show for it! To keep up with LIC’s 500+hp AccessPORT-tuned machine, check out the LIC Motorsports blog! To see what the AccessPORT can do for your car, head over to www.cobbtuning.com!