We ran our second NASA event of the season last weekend at Pueblo Motorsports Park. Round 2 of the Rocky Mountain championship. Two LFR cars at the track, a brand new telemetry rig running alongside our usual AIM data, and a setup back at the shop that might be the most important development of our 2026 season.
Two LFR cars at Pueblo Motorsports Park, Round 2 of the NASA Rocky Mountain championship.
Liam found speed. The field found him.
Liam Koenig drove his second race weekend of the season this past Saturday and Sunday. The headline is simple: he found real speed out there. Lap times we hadn't seen from him before. The kind of jump in pace that tells you the kid is figuring it out, not just running clean.
The frustrating part: the field was on its A game. Every other Spec Miata driver who showed up had pace too. Passing for position was a fight every time. A few times Liam had the speed to make the move but couldn't make it stick. Solid weekend on raw lap time, less than he wanted on results.
That's racing. The drivers who get faster fastest are the ones who learn to read a stronger field, not just push harder against a softer one. Liam got a real dose of that this weekend.
The setup that's championship-ready
I went out to shake down some changes we'd made to another car. We've been working on a setup direction for months — small adjustments, data review between sessions, careful iteration.
Honest read after Pueblo: it was probably the fastest car setup I have ever driven. Genuinely. Not "feels nice" fast. Actually fast.
That matters because it tells me the car is ready for the national championship. Not "could be ready with more work." Ready now. That's a big confidence point heading into the rest of the season — and it changes what we're chasing for the rest of 2026.
300GB of video, 15GB of data
Tomas — our intern, the engineering-and-Marine-veteran one — had his telemetry device with him for the whole weekend. The job was straightforward and ambitious at the same time: capture his rig's data and our AIM data simultaneously, then compare them.
We left Pueblo with about 300 GB of video and 15 GB of raw data in an Excel spreadsheet. That is a serious dataset for a club race weekend.
Mining it will take a while. But the comparison is the point. AIM gives us channels we trust. Tomas's rig gives us a second source. When they agree, our confidence in a number goes up. When they disagree, we have a real diagnostic problem to chase. Either way, we learn something we couldn't learn from one data source alone.
This is the kind of work that quietly separates the teams that win national championships from the teams that finish mid-pack. Not because anyone notices it from the outside. Because at the end of a season, the team with the cleaner data is making smaller bets.
The newest LFR car, back from alignment and one shakedown away from its first track session.
The newest car comes home
Our newest LFR car got back from alignment this week too. It's at the shop, hood up, very close to hitting the track for its first shakedown. Photos above. It's a clean build — and shaking it down is the next thing on the calendar.
Three cars in active rotation. One driver progressing in the program. A telemetry rig that's making us better at understanding what the data actually says. A setup direction that's championship-ready. None of that happens alone. It's the team showing up week after week, weekend after weekend.
If you're a young driver wondering whether the Kart to Car path is real or just marketing — Liam at Pueblo this weekend, on pace with a field that was on its A game in his second race in cars, is what real looks like.
Do you believe?
— Jett LeadFoot Racing