Photos courtesy of Richard Prince
Huntsville race car driver and entrepreneur Martin Barkey is making his presence known in the Pirelli World Challenge series. With nearly half the events completed, Barkey is in second place overall following his results May 27 and 28 at Lime Rock Park Connecticut in his MBRP KTM XBow GT4.
He readily admits, however, the challenge will be staying there. There are two races at each event, and Barkey qualified for the pole position both days.
A week earlier he also won the pole position for the first race at Canadian Tire Motorsports Park in Bowmanville, the only Canadian stop on the tour.
Speaking about the Motorsports Park race Barkey said, “There are ten turns on that track. If you can do well in the first three turns and so forth, I remember thinking on that last lap, as I could see the timer in my car that gives predictive timing, that I have a record lap going here and have two more corners and I just focused on each corner at a time and it worked out well.”
Barkey finished fifth in the first race and eighth in the second at the Motorsports event.
The Pirelli World Challenge series is a North American professional road racing series that races at all the large race tracks North America has to offer. It draws the largest crowds and also has most of the big name pro drivers in the world racing in this series.
Pictures from the weekend at Lime Rock Park Connecticut courtesy of Richard Prince.
The cars are under strict guidelines as to what can and cannot be done to get the best performance, with the goal being to make them as competitive as possible. Barkey says those regulations have hurt him especially at Lime Rock even though he had the advantage of starting first on the grid.
“We have a car that is very, very fast on the corners,” explained Barkey, “and very slow in the straights. We basically just get passed on long straights. Motorsport park is a lot of high speed corners and we are super fast in those corners. We get down through corners two, three and four, but then what happens, whoever is in second place, drove right by me, then some others.”
“This professional series has what they call ‘balance of performance’. They try to get all of the cars to run about the same lap times. Some cars are really good in the straight zone, some good in the corners and some good in the brake zones, but have a lot of miles per hour. It really hurts us on tracks with a long straight stretch.”
At Lime Rock, Barkey finished seventh in the first race and had the fastest lap time which gave him the pole for the second race Sunday. He finished fifth in that event.
We were the only car on the track without traction control and it had rained. So what happens when we put power down our car just spins, while everyone else’s car does the thinking for them. I felt like a rookie in a pro series.Martin Barkey
“The next day I started at the pole and was in third place by the first corner and after a few laps everyone just basically drove by me. I had some technical difficulty at the grid where our car is sitting at 7200 and my car started to roll a little. If I roll before the lights go out, I’ll be disqualified and put to the back of the line. So I had to take my foot off the throttle, put my foot on the brake, and hold the car from rolling and as soon as I did that the lights went out. I had to get back to throttle. My car’s a turbo car so had no boost and about three cars got by me going into corner one. I made a move to the outside between one and two on one of the guys that passed me and he literally pushed me off the track and into the grass, so I went from pole to the second last car but I still got back to fifth.
“I am lucky to be in second place overall behind a four-time champion. To stay there you have to be smart, can’t take the high risk, because if I don’t finish the race then first place will be out of reach with the points.”
The next races in the Pirelli World Challenge are June 23 to 25 in Elkhart Lake, Wisconsin at Road America. Barkey and his teammate Anthony Mantella are hoping for more good results.
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