Coming hot on the heels of a Hoosier Racing Tire SCCA® Super Tour (HST) weekend at NOLA, the series jumps right back into action five days later and 2,000 miles away in Central California at Buttonwillow Raceway Park (BRP) for a Feb. 23-25, 2024, event hosted by SCCA’s Cal Club Region.
Situated midway between San Francisco and San Diego, the visit to BRP will be the third HST weekend of the year. However, it is the first of only two West Coast stops on the 2024 HST calendar (the second one taking place at Oregon’s Portland International Raceway in May).
BRP remains one of the finest road race and test facilities in the U.S., with 40 different layout configurations. Plans are for this year’s HST weekend to traverse configuration 25 in a clockwise direction. That layout is 2.92 miles in length and includes turns such as Phil Hill, Riverside, Sunrise, and Sunset, to name a few.
There’s still time to join in on the excitement. Drivers can click here to get registered for competition, and volunteers should click here to let organizers know they’ll be coming, too.
Weekend Plans at Buttonwillow
On-track activities for the three-day BRP event begin Friday at 8 a.m. PT with 25-minute practice sessions for each of the seven run groups, followed by 25-minute qualifying sessions in the afternoon.
Saturday opens at 8 a.m. local time, with a second round of qualifying for all run groups, but this time, sessions are only 20 minutes in length. Then racing begins Saturday afternoon at 12:05 p.m. PT with 25-minute events for each race group. The day concludes with a party and food for all in attendance.
When Sunday comes about, drivers take to the track again for either 35-minute or 17-lap races beginning at 8:20 a.m. local time and continuing until approximately 3:30 p.m.
Click the button below for the complete schedule.
Tracking Class Competition
The BRP entry list shows the largest class will be Spec Racer® Ford Gen3 (SRF3), which makes up the fourth run group. Competitors include a couple former National Championship Runoffs winners. In the mix, too, is reigning SRF3 HST Nationwide Points Champion Caleb Shrader. That means both SRF3 races will be chock full of thrills.
Two more reigning HST Nationwide Points Champions will take to the circuit in the sixth run group. One of those drivers is Jim Devenport, the 2023 Prototype 1 HST Nationwide Points Champion; and the other is Timothy Day, the reigning Prototype 2 HST Nationwide Points Champion. That run group also includes more than a half dozen Formula Enterprises®2 entries, which is a field known for great battles at BRP.
Opening racing each day in the first run group will be Spec Miata (SM) and the new Spec MX-5 (SMX) class. More than a half dozen SMX drivers will be on hand, including RACER magazine motorsports journalist Richard James. That class is working its way toward naming the first-ever HST Nationwide Points Champion in 2024, as well as an inaugural SCCA National Champion this fall during SCCA’s National Championship Runoffs® at Road America in Wisconsin.
The fifth run group at BRP houses the rumbling big-bore classes, and the seven-entrant GT-2 field will be one to watch. Then, closing out each day in the seventh run group, will be a Super Touring® Lite field with a half dozen entries. But drivers in Super Touring® Under, Touring 2, Touring 3, and Touring 4 have been known to end BRP race days with tight battles, too.
For additional information about the Hoosier Super Tour at BRP, check out the event webpage link below.
Catch the Action from Buttonwillow
The HST stop at BRP is open to the public and free for spectators. Come on out and be trackside to experience the thrills, and meander through the paddock to spy awesome machinery and meet great people.
For those who can’t get to Buttonwillow for the event, another option for following the action is the Hoosier Super Tour online video coverage. The familiar voices of commentators Brian Bielanski and Gregg Ginsberg will be calling the play-by-play action while DriversEye Live produces the live video broadcast.
Watching HST broadcasts online is simple: Coverage is provided free of charge and streamed live at the SCCA YouTube page, as well as the SCCA Official and SCCA Road Racing pages on Facebook.
Post-race video interviews with many winners from Saturday, and Sunday victory podium celebration videos, will also be viewable at the SCCA Road Racing Facebook page.
As always, live Timing & Scoring is available throughout the weekend at scca.com/live. On-demand viewing of the action from BRP will be made available after the event.
Photo by Wedrick Campbell/First Place Visuals
