Can you race an MX-5 Cup car on an oval? Sure can.

For the first time in its history, Mazda MX-5 Cup competed on an oval track, the storied NASCAR venue Martinsville Speedway. How hard can it be? Turn left and go fast, right?

One of those participants was Andy Jankowiak. He certainly understands oval-track racing, competing in a variety of classes, from indoor midget races to stock cars at the Daytona superspeedway. Andy’s road course experience, however, is limited to the annual ARCA race at Watkins Glen and tracking a Miata at that same track to prep for the big event.

“It’s like a street stock and a TQ midget got drunk and made a baby,” says Andy of the experience. “Low horsepower and light. They drive like a street car, and it’s a ton of fun. The power shifter is cool.”

Andy Jankowiak (2) at Martinsville. Photo courtesy Mike Paris/Andy J Racing.

Two-time MX-5 Cup champion and eventual Martinsville winner Jared Thomas knows ovals, too. He raced late models on short tracks for a few years.

“With an oval, you have to be really spot on with the setup, getting that car as perfect as it can be for both ends of the track,” Jared explains. “Where with a 15-, 20-turn road course, that car is not going to be perfect in every single corner. You got to improvise as a driver and make it work as best as you can. On an oval, you got to be meticulous with your feedback [to the crew], making sure you’re getting the most of your setup.”

Jared dug into his old oval-track notes to see what they had done on flat paved ovals. With a Mazda MX-5 Cup car, though, your adjustments are relatively limited.

Yes, you have caster, camber, toe. Yes, there are double-adjustable shocks and adjustable anti-roll bars. However, unlike a road course, on an oval you want that setup to help the car go in just one direction.

“When coming up in circle track, I got to work with [short-track legend] Gary [St. Amant] some, and he told me, ‘The three L’s to circle track are low, light and left,’” Jared says. “When you’re thinking of any kind of adjustment to the car, you got to use those three.”

Mazda MX-5 Cup rules specifies the springs: 500 lbs./in. ones on the front and 300 lbs./in. on the rear. For Martinsville, they eased the placement of where you can put those springs. So, of course, the 500s go on the right, 300s on the left.

While moving ballast to the left side would be ideal, Jared says they struggled to find places to put it. Trying to use stagger, with bigger tire circumferences on the right versus the left, didn’t work well, adds Jared, as the radial tires do not grow as much with air pressure like the bias-ply ones commonly used on ovals.

“A big one is the camber,” says Jared. “Getting as much positive on the left side as we could with a stock suspension.”

Jared Thomas. Photo courtesy Alison Arena/JTR Motorsports Engineering.

The team that Andy had competed with, Hendricks Motorsports, has a wealth of road racing experience, but only one other event in MX-5 Cup this past season–Sebring. The team started off as one of the slowest cars and gradually improved to a top-10 contender. Andy struggled with a “loose-in, good-off or a good-in, tight-off” situation during the race.

“The biggest thing I pushed for was probably not in their playbook,” Andy contends. “I made the argument if we take left-rear tire pressure out, it’s going to decrease spring rate to make the car do the same thing through the whole corner. We were doing wedge in, wedge out, I was either giving up the entry or giving up the exit. In road racing, with a low-horsepower car, you fight rolling resistance quite a bit. They were worried about rolling resistance slowing the mph on the straightaways. We’re not at Laguna Seca–the straightaways are not that long. The rolling speed in the corners is much more important.”

Despite the limitations to adjustments, the cars exceeded expectations at Martinsville.

“At first, we were like, ‘Are we going to be able to get the cars to turn left well enough?’ Jared says. “They do. Being a shorter wheelbase helps with that. You didn’t see a lot of guys that were tight. More or less, I would say everybody was on the looser side–the car was rotating too much.”

Were they fast? The NASCAR Cup Series polesitter in November, Martin Truex Jr., turned a 19.686-second lap. Kyle Dudley ran a 20.080-second lap to land the pole for the late model stock car race in September. Jared turned the fastest lap in the MX-5 Cup race, with a 22.778.

“One thing in question was how are they going to look, speed-wise, to the fans sitting there,” says Jared. “I think the cars looked pretty good. For a low-horsepower car, the times we were running were pretty respectful.”

Most Mazda MX-5 Cup races run around 20 to 30 laps. Martinsville was slated for 100. That introduced a new element to the series.

“Even though the MX-5s are smaller, lighter, lower horsepower cars, they’re still using up tires and brakes,” says Jared. “You could cook the brakes. If you went hard for 10 to 15 laps in a row, you would start to feel brake fade. Knowing to pace yourself was one of the biggest things I took away from oval-track racing. When we were running a lot of the 100-lap features, guys who were always good saved their stuff and were in the right position about 25 laps to go.”

Andy, too, waited for his opportunity, but admittedly missed.

“My vision was that this was going to start getting rough towards the end of the race,” says Andy. “I’ve always been pretty good at missing stuff. I was trying to get into the top five, racing in front of a guy who had already wrecked me twice in the race. I was trying too hard to get going and I got the back end stepped out and started fishtailing it. Then that guy came and hit me anyway and we all wrecked. It was on me. I was probably doing a bit too much. I had an eighth-place car, and I was trying to get a fifth place out of it.”

Jared Thomas and crew in victory lane. Photo courtesy Alison Arena/JTR Motorsports Engineering.

In the end, Jared won and got a Martinsville Speedway clock, but was the event overall a win? Jared believes so.

“It opened people’s eyes [to the series],” says Jared. “Everybody that’s in the inside crowd has known MX-5 Cup racing is awesome. This was an opportunity to open the eyes of a different fan base.”

Andy now has a new respect for the series.

“My body–I’m more sore after that race than I have been in years,” says Andy. “With a [purpose-built] race car, you just sit in the seat and turn the steering wheel. [The MX-5 Cup car is] like if you’re going on a [New York State] Thruway ramp with your Chrysler and you get out of shape. You don’t just sit and turn the wheel. You jump up, you’re tensed up on the wheel, using your body weight to balance the wheel out. With a street car, there are so many little nuances. The suspension is going to slip and grip and grab and slide and glide and do everything you don’t expect it to do 20 ways in a row. That’s kind of how I drove those MX-5s every lap, just on the wheel, using your body.”

Will there be more races on ovals for the MX-5 Cup series? Nothing scheduled, yet, but Jared believes it might happen. He might be onto something when you consider Connor Zilisch. He used MX-5 Cup as a steppingstone on his way to racing for Dale Earnhardt Jr.’s team in the NASCAR Xfinity Series next year.

“The avenue of going the oval route is now a legitimate thing through the MX-5 Cup,” says Jared. “With as many road courses on the NASCAR schedule now, you got to be able to perform on both an oval and a road course.”

 

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