Op-ed provided by F4 pilot James Palczynski
VMB Driver Development F4 Pilot Rayce Dykstra Getting Ready For His First Race of The 2019 Season
This weekend, while the attention of the racing world is focused 8,000 miles away on Melbourne, Australia for the inaugural race of the 2019 Formula One season, all of these things we love about the sport are also on full display right here on track at Sonoma Raceway. It’s not hard to imagine, particularly as the FIA’s Formula 4 and Formula 3 continue to gain traction across the United States… that an American world champion might very well emerge to prove them wrong. Across the pond, the naysayers have been so bold as to claim that American drivers are simply not good enough for the pinnacle of the sport. That’s a gauntlet in need of picking up.The excitement, drama, intensity and passion of the 2019 formula racing season begins this weekend. We fans will, as we love to do, speculate and argue and pin our hopes on the drivers and teams we want to see prove themselves champions. The pilots on the grid get younger and faster every year. The engineering in the cars continues to push the envelope and, in a sport where results are too often dominated by budget, scrappy, upstart teams with more desire than cash continue to prove that, at least in the midfield, it is determination and guts that win points and capture glory. We love racing because the stakes are always high, because caution goes to the wind and because anything… absolutely anything, can happen.
The country held brief hopes of slapping that kind of sentiment in 2006 when California native Scott Speed drove for Toro Rosso. His seat marked the first time an American driver had captured one of the few, coveted spots in the sport since legendary Champion Mario Andretti retired almost thirty years ago. Speed’s racing career continued successfully in various series of racing, but it is unfortunately tough to argue with Toro Rosso’s decision to replace him with a young German driver by the name of Sebastian Vettel.
2018 F4 Winter Series Champion Kyle Loh is Ready To Get His Sophomore Season Underway!
Today, here in Sonoma, Kyle Loh and Rayce Dykstra are two young drivers who dare to believe that they might just have what it takes to go all the way. They know, as we’ve noted, that anything… absolutely anything can happen in racing. To see if they can will their dreams into reality, they are on track with Sonoma-based World Speed Motorsports, a veteran racing organization that has a long history of grooming young talent. Kyle and Rayce will prove themselves in the Ligier JS-F4, the state of art car in Formula 4 racing, the FIA’s world-wide entry-level formula class. There are now dozens of young drivers competing across the country in this light, fast and agile car.
Although the FIA’s F4 series is relatively new, it’s done exactly as intended… the most exciting young drivers in Formula One this year are recent F4 series veterans. McClaren’s Lando Norris, a 19 years old British pilot, first showed his racing talent with podiums in the ADAC, BDRC and Italian F4 series in 2015. Canadian Lance Stroll, having moved to F1’s Racing Point team for this year from Williams first demonstrated his talent as the 2014 Italian F4 Champion. There are others right behind them, including American F4 Champions Kyle Kirkwood and Cameron Das, who have each moved to Formula 3 with a lot of momentum.
Aptly named Rayce Dykstra is a third-generation racer from Colorado. The teenager has amassed an impressive and growing list of accomplishments, including Karting championships and an incredible podium placement rate… 34 times in 39 races last year. He is racing with the support of Worldspeed’s VMB driver development scholarship this year, his first season in an F4. Our eyes are certainly on this young talent from Colorado.
20 year old Kyle Loh is also a tenacious and passionate racer with a growing resume of Karting and car racing accomplishments. He is looking to break out this year after a solid introduction to the F4 platform in 2018, which including total domination of the F4 races at Sonoma last summer. No doubt he is looking to repeat that performance this weekend, especially following a mishap in recent testing at this challenging track that sent him into a barrier at close to full throttle coming out of turn one. Kyle is clearly unshaken and undeterred and eager to race.
Telo Stewart, the force at the helm of World Speed and a key figure in the rapid development of F4 racing on the West Coast commented, “All of us at World Speed are looking forward to this season and this weekend at our home track. Both of these drivers are second year drivers with us and usually that is when things really start to click. It is the first year of the VMB F4 program and that growth is rewarding to see in the 6th year of that program. We will also be fielding two PFMs in the Formula Car Challenge here this weekend, John Purcell and Jay Horak, and that will be some good racing too.”
Whatever the outcome may be this weekend, while the big boys are running at the limit half a world away in Melbourne with budgets in the hundreds of millions of dollars… the scrappy racing going on right here in Sonoma is both more accessible and more interesting and, in a great many ways, much closer to the reasons why we love the sport.
Both the Formula Car Challenge presented by Goodyear, and the Formula Pro USA F4 Western Championships take place March 16th – 17th.
Live Timing & Results (Group F):
https://racehero.io/orgs/nasa-norcal
Event Schedule:
https://nasanorcal.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/Mar-16-17-2019-Schedule-Paddock-Maps.pdf