Ozarks International Raceway has not been around long enough for anyone to have mastered it, which makes the Thursday practice day so critical to drivers who seek the unfair advantage ahead of the 2025 NASA Championships.
OIR’s 19 turns are made all the more complex with blind rises and varying radii, which makes finding the best line as difficult as it is useful. Even drivers who have been here before are still discovering those little extra bits of speed and grip that are so essential to putting together good laps at OIR.
Many of the drivers — well all of them actually — are finding the track to be as demanding and challenging as it is rewarding. As has been said before, many of those who drive it for the first time declare it their new favorite track. It’s challenging. It’s vexing. It’s addicting.
Adam Merchant, NASA Rocky Mountain Region
Hailing from the NASA Rocky Mountain Region, Super Touring 3 driver Adam Merchant was excited to make his first trip to OIR with is BMW E36 with a full kit of aero development. Since this is his first time at OIR, he started out slowly to get a feel for the track, then built speed as the day progressed.
“It’s a little intimidating according to what everybody tells you about it, but it lives up to its expectations for sure,” Merchant said.
The challenge as always is knowing where you can push the car so that in the event of a mistake, you won’t ball up the car or pay too high a price for the error. At Ozarks International Raceway, there are a lot of fast corners that are also blind, so gaining familiarity as quickly as possible is key.
“I mean, you could always go faster in the corners, right? That’s where the speed is,” Merchant said. “It’s interesting to trust the car there when it’s starting to get unsettled in some of those corners. There is, on this track, it does seem like there’s a little bit of looseness coming into a few, or if you change your line a little bit, you can get a smoother portion of track. You can keep the car from getting unsettled. So, I’m kind of working on finding time on those corners. Right now in those areas, 1 mph at the top of Turn 7 goes all the way around. So if you can keep the car straight, you keep the throttle down early, you can gain a lot. Yeah, there are long straights after very important corners. We’re kind of focusing on those right now.”
Merchant will qualify Friday among of a field of 10 Super Touring 3 cars.
Lisa Vaughn, NASA Texas Region
NASA Texas Super Touring 4 driver Lisa Vaughn made the trip from her home region to compete at OIR in July to learn the track and see what things she might need to change on her car to get the setup right for the 2025 NASA Championships. To be clear, Vaughn learned a lot and changed a lot.
“We’ve done a lot of stuff to the car. We’ve changed the setup, we’ve changed springs, we’ve changed shocks, we’ve changed settings, we’ve changed tire pressures, we’ve changed alignment, all to try and tackle the challenges that a high-speed track can throw at you,” she said.
Those changes and the valuable seat time Vaughn has been amassing during Thursday practice has her confidence on the rise and her lap times dropping. The car’s a lot more stable and it’s handling the corners and the speed a lot better, and when we spoke to her, she still had a few practice sessions left to run.
“It’s always a good day to go fast. I don’t know that that’s any different for anybody else, but what we’ve been trying to do is just work on my confidence in the car and my confidence and my knowledge of the track,” Vaughn said. “The Roller Coaster, I want to lift at the top of the Roller Coaster, and I know that I don’t need to, but man, that foot comes up every time. And so I’m working there and just working on carrying more speed through the higher-speed corners.”
Vaughn is set to qualify on Friday among a field of 11 Super Touring 4 cars, all but one of which are BMWs.
Derek Fletcher, NASA MidAmerica Region
As a card-carrying member of the NASA MidAmerica Region, which has raced at OIR more than any other sanctioning body, Derek Fletcher has a lot of laps under his belt at this track in Time Trial GT. But even so, he was taking full advantage of Thursday practice ahead of the 2025 NASA Championships.
“Today I’m going out to see how long my fuel’s going to last, how many laps it’ll last because I want the least amount of fuel that I can carry for weight reasons,” Fletcher said. “I’m testing tires. I started off on a 200 treadwear tire, now I’m on a Hoosier A7, so I’m expecting a big difference there. And I’ve got a new cold air intake that I’m testing out. So for me, practice is really a test and tune.”
Fletcher’s goals for the day are to whittle his lap times down and see how his car behaves on the new Hoosier tires and polish his skills on the parts of the track where he still can pick up some speed.
“I really have the Roller Coaster figured out. I mean, I’m flat out through there. I would say after that is where most of my opportunities lie. All the way from turns 10 through 14 is what I’m working on today the most. And everywhere else, I wouldn’t say I have figured it out, but I’m to the point where I’m pretty quick through the rest of the track.”
Fletcher is going to have his work cut out for him. He is competing in TTGT, a class with eight other quick drivers who are piloting some serious hardware.
Wilson Lam, NASA Southern California Region
Having never raced at Ozarks International Raceway, NASA SoCal’s Wilson Lam had prepared for the event by watching a lot of video and practicing on a simulator.
Lam started out practice day slowly, do what he calls “recon” on his first session and then gradually building speed from there. As part of Team Indotech Motorsports, Lam also picked up a few pointers from teammates who were able to lower their lap times a bit more than he was.
“I have two sections of the track that are confusing me. So those are the two that I focused on,” Lam said. “The 3, 4, 5 section, and also the 13 to 14 section for me.
“This is my first big event traveling super far. Alex (Indotech team owner) has done it a few times before. He had to kind of drag me kicking and screaming,” Lam said. “I kind of didn’t want to do it, but I’m glad we did. It’s just one hell of an experience that money can’t buy. You just have to do it.”
Lam will line up against competitive group of drivers in Super Touring 5 for qualifying on Friday. Time will tell who gets to be up front for the qualifying races on Saturday.
Joe Federl, NASA Texas Region
Joe Federl raced Ozarks International Raceway for the first time in July and declared the Missouri track his new favorite.
“I’ve race all over the U.S.,” said Federl, who’s competing in Spec Miata. “I’ve done Sebring, Homestead, Watkins Glen, Road America, Road Atlanta, although this is my favorite one.”
Federl, who races in the NASA Texas Region, feels for drivers running Ozarks International Raceway for the first time. Calling it a challenging track both physically and mentally, Federl has been testing the limits of the track.
“It took me like five or six sessions to really feel comfortable with (the track),” Federl said. “Even still, it’s an intimidating track.”
For Federl, the off-camber, high-speed turns 7 and 9 can be intimidating for drivers racing the Ozarks for the first time. He used Thursday’s practice session to improve his braking into turns and has shaved his lap times every session.
“We came here with a baseline setup that was already pretty decent, and now we’re fine tuning it,” Federl said. “Instead of doing huge setup changes or changing sway bars, we’re doing just slight, very small changes. It’s just dialing in the car.”
The top cars in the Spec Miata field are within half a second of the unofficial track record, which sits at 2:44.35. If the cooler weather prevails over the weekend, there’s a good chance the record could be broken. Federl said he needs to improve his lap time by a half second to win the Spec Miata class.
“A half a second is really not that much,” Federl said. “You do a minor setup change and that can be the difference between fifth and first.”
Patrick Kroll, NASA Great Lakes
One thing Patrick Kroll has learned from competing in now his sixth NASA National Championships is that the event is an endurance test. Kroll doesn’t overthink it. In Super Touring 4, he treats practice sessions as just that —practice.
“You don’t want to go out and practice and run ten-tenths and break something or overwork something,” said Kroll, who runs in the NASA Great Lakes Region. “As a driver, it’s a good time to explore the curves here and there, see how the car reacts over it and just get settled in for the weekend.”
On a track such as Ozarks International Raceway, Kroll suggests new drivers take the course slow and gradually build up speed. “When you learn to drive, you don’t go out there and think you’re Max Verstappen,” Kroll said. “You can’t go out with that mentality.”
Kroll said he picks spots on the track during his practice sessions to test his brake zones, making sure there is adequate runoff.
“I’m not going to try it where I don’t have runoff,” he said. “If I go long in one corner, I know the limit and I learn from that.”
Kroll is also playing the horsepower game with his BMW M3. The team put the car on the dyno before attending the NASA National Championships, but don’t plan to do a dyno test over the weekend. The BMW’s engine hasn’t been touched since it was built, so the team knows the power output.
“We tend to run a few percent of our horsepower target under what we actually classify as in the regulations,” Kroll said. “If we get dynoed and it’s a good dyno day, we push a little extra horsepower and we’re not busting.”
