Tight Race For Podium In MX-5 Cup Toronto

In this in-car video, we see Winding Road Team TFB driver Tom Martin III running in a group (Max Faulkner, Luke Oxner, Nathanial Sparks and Keith Jensen) fighting hard for third place on the Streets of Toronto. Tom started P6 and finished P6, but that doesn't really tell the story, as is often the case in racing.

We notice a few things from this video. First of all, the risks drivers take on the first lap are pretty big. Sometimes that works out, sometimes it doesn't, but in this case everyone involved backed up substantially. Patience would seem to be a virtue, although that is easier said than done.

The "be patient" point is reinforced later in the video. On lap 1, Tom backs up to 8th with all the argy-bargy. And yet he still could have finished 3rd (Sparks, who backs up to 9th behind Tom, eventually finishes 3rd). To do that, Tom would need to have been faster than Sparks, which he wasn't.

And the third thing we notice is that passing skills are key. To some degree this seems an unfair argument, since you have to say "be cautious and wait for the race to come to you" and also say "be aggressive and force the issue". But, really, passing skill is knowing when to force the issue and then being able to pull it off cleanly.

Tom commented "I was happy with the overall result because in some ways that was a sloppy race for me, with a few missed shifts and completely missing my braking point for T3 when Luke and Max got together. Still, my lap times were decent and I kept it off the walls, which takes some doing with all the bumps and changing surfaces."