Story By: LAZ DENES / TEAMSLR – ST. AUGUSTINE, FL – After a pair of race weekends on the banks of the mighty Mississippi – the first on the outskirts of New Orleans and the second some 650 miles up river, just across fromdowntown St. Louis – the Cube 3 Architecture TA2 Series shifts its focus on the quaint, New England setting of Lime Rock Park in Lakeville, Connecticut, for Saturday’s traditional Memorial Day Classic.
TeamSLR will field a pair of M1 Racecars machines in the 75-minute, 68-lap race around the scenic and lightning-fast 1.48-mile, seven-turn hillside road course led by 2024 fulltime driver Barry Boes and his No. 27 Accio Data/SLR-M1 Racecars Ford Mustang.
Joining Boes and TeamSLR for the first time will be 18-year-old Evan Slater, a native of Portsmouth, New Hampshire, who will take the reins of the No. 17 Cube 3 Architecture/Paul Racing/Tom Haas Foundation/SLR-M1 Chevrolet Camaro for his 24th career TA2 start.
Boes, arrives at Lime Rock atop the TA2 Pro-Am Challenge championship-within-a-championship standings, a position he’s held since scoring back-to-back Pro-Am victories at the opening two rounds at Sebring (Fla.) International Raceway in February and at Michelin Raceway Road Atlanta in March.
This weekend, his goal is to put a recent string of bad luck behind him as he tackles the short but demanding Lime Rock circuit for the fourth time since 2019. An opening-lap incident led to his early exit from this year’s round three last month at NOLA Motorsports Park in Avondale, Louisiana, and a similar outcome cut short his round-four effort two weekends ago at World Wide Technology Raceway (WWTR) in Madison, Illinois. Undaunted, Boes has full confidence in the ability of his M1 Racecars equipment to meet the challenges presented by Lime Rock’s typically tight-quarters racing in just his fifth career outing with TeamSLR.
Slater, meanwhile, will be making his first TA2 appearance since his sixth and final outing of 2023 with Ken Thwaits’ Showtime Motorsports M1 Racecars team in the August race at Watkins Glen (N.Y.) International. He relishes the opportunity to make his return on the Lime Rock circuit he considers his home track, where he scored the best of his 23 career TA2 starts in May 2022 with a runner-up finish in the No. 35 Cube 3 Architecture Chevrolet Camaro. He also looks to finish the job he started at Lime Rock a year ago this weekend, when he held down second place in Showtime’s No. 6 Franklin Road Apparel Chevrolet Camaro for the first 63 of 66 race laps, only to have a fuel-injector issue foil his victory bid on the frantic, final restart, leaving him with an eighth-place result.
Slater is the fourth young driver to make his TA2 debut in TeamSLR M1 Racecars equipment this season in the interests of developing his road-racing craft, including a pair of 16-year-olds – Gavan Boschele and Julian DaCosta. Boschele drove the No. 28 SLR-M1 Racecars entry to finishes of 15th at Sebring, eighth at Road Atlanta and seventh at NOLA, while DaCosta’s TA2 debut resulted in a 10th-place finish from the ninth starting position at NOLA. In the most recent round at WWTR, 18-year-old Jake Finch, a two-time winner in the ARCA Menards Series, drove the No. 17 Phoenix Construction/SLR-M1 Racecars Chevrolet Camaro in his TA2 debut and was vying for a solid top-10 finish before a tire barrier bounced into the path of his racecar during a late-race incident that he otherwise would have avoided.
Riding along with this weekend’s TeamSLR drivers and their M1 Racecars, as it will all season long, is Nashville, Tennessee-based Franklin Road Apparel Company, which has been a longtime team supporter.
M1 Racecars was represented on the podium at 12 of the 13 TA2 rounds in 2023, highlighted by a pair of victories by two-time series champion Rafa Matos of Peterson Racing. Team SLR’s Dillon Machavern and Thad Moffitt both scored podium finishes, as did TeamSLR driver Connor Mosack at the season-opening event at Sebring, when he qualified on the pole and led the first 19 laps of the race before finishing third. At this year’s Sebring season opener, Austin Green of the two-car Peterson Racing contingent was the top-finishing M1 Racecars entry with his fifth-place result.
Memorial Day Classic weekend kicks off with a TA2 test session at 11:25 a.m. EDT Friday, followed by official TA2 practice at 2:25 p.m. and qualifying at 5:20. Race time Saturday is 1:10 p.m. with series partner MAVTV providing live television coverage, augmented by live streaming video on the Trans Am and SpeedTour channels on YouTube. MAVTV will air a 60-minute race show at 8 p.m. EDT on Thursday, May 30.
Barry Boes, Driver, No. 27 Accio Data/SLR-M1 Racecars Ford Mustang:
You weathered back-to-back races where you were stricken with bad luck and arrive at Lime Rock still leading the Pro-Am Challenge standings. How will you approach this weekend on the racetrack?
“First things first, I intend to finish the race this weekend. When I get back in the car, I forget that I had any bad luck before, at all. The kinds of things that have happened to me, there was nothing I could’ve done about it, so there’s no use in worrying about it when I’m in the car. Lime Rock is one of those tracks where there are probably four places on the racetrack where you have to almost go off or be slow, and we’ll have to do that for 68 laps, which means there will be almost 280 opportunities to do it just perfectly, to go off track, or to be slow. I’m ready to settle in and run the same perfect lap over and over again.”
This will be your fourth TA2 outing at Lime Rock since 2019. Describe what it will take to achieve your best result there this weekend.
“I’ve gone there and have gone fast in the dry. We had a wet race there where we also ran really well, but we made the wrong choice on tires. The wet race (in 2022) was going pretty good for me and I was feeling pretty confident. We were racing hard in the rain. Last year, I got taken out in turn four just 10 laps or so into the race, so I’m ready to get out there and get after it. I know that I can be fast there. I’m really good at tracks that require you to just consistently do the same things over and over again with very little margin for error. Just need to make it through the start, not get taken out, and not make any mistakes. The goal, like it always is, is to get in the racecar and get everything out of it every lap. Once you figure out the perfect thing to do, you just keep doing that same thing with an eye on changes in the track, changes in the tires. You just keep doing the exact thing you did the last lap, looking for teeny, tiny changes along the way. Getting in the groove and pounding out laps consistently, that’s what I feel I’m good at.”
Evan Slater, Driver, No. 17 Cube 3 Architecture/Paul Racing/Tom Haas Foundation/SLR-M1 Racecars Chevrolet Camaro:
You’re back in a TA2 car for the first time since last August at Watkins Glen and for the first time with TeamSLR. Your thoughts about returning to the series this weekend with TeamSLR?
“We did a test day together at Lime Rock last month and I really liked the environment, I really liked the team, and I was able to tell Scott (Lagasse Jr.) knows what he’s talking about, so I’m excited for this weekend. We only ran a couple of sessions, but the test was good, we were running faster than race pace there last year. I’ve got super-high confidence in Scott and I’m very confident in my driving, so I’m really excited to get out there and show everybody that even though I haven’t been in the Trans Am Series in a while, that I still have the skills to run up front and contend for the win. I ran second there last year for 63 of the 66 race laps, but a fuel injector failed and I got swamped on the final restart and finished eighth.”
What are your impressions of Lime Rock Park and the kind of racing that is typical there?
“I’m from Portsmouth, New Hampshire, which is three-and-a-half or four hours away, so I would probably consider it my home track. I did my first TA2 race there back in 2021, running an M1 Racecars chassis for B2 Motorsports, owned by Cliff White. We did some setup work with Scott back then, but it was a separate team. Lime Rock is like a NASCAR track but backwards, with all the right-hand turns. It’s a fun track, really high-risk, high-reward. You’ve really got to push the car right up to the limit, and when you run at that limit, that’s what makes it fun. It’s super technical because you have to set up your racecar to basically go all right, but still manage the lefthander.”
How was your experience working with TeamSLR during your test day last month, and what are you expecting this weekend?
“From what I’ve seen so far, they’re super professional, really focused on the data, looking at every session and finding how to take these cars and really, really maximize them. They have a really cool approach that I’ve not experienced before, where they tell me to just focus on the driving and they work on the setup. In my past experiences with other teams, I’ve had to play a role in the setup, but these guys have such great engineers, they are confident and equipped to take care of all that. So it’s a really cool experience where I can focus on the driving and giving them good feedback and leave the engineering to them.”