This article first appeared in the July, 2016 edition of SportsCar Magazine. SCCA members can read the current and past editions of SportCar digitally here after logging into their account; To become an SCCA member and get SportsCar mailed to your home address monthly in addition to the digital editions, click here.
Jacob Loomis
Texas Region
SCCA Member since 2015
To a grownup of a certain age, the reality still seems amazing. Where young men and women who aspired to a motorsports career once began their quest at perhaps 17, 18, or 19, today, one finds that often that number has been reduced by a decade or more. Now it’s almost common in this column to discover that the subject donned a helmet and a driving suit and sat down in a go-kart about the time he or she entered first grade and has been advancing up the motorsports ladder since then. Yes, amazing, indeed.
Witness Texas Region’s Jacob Loomis, a thoughtful, well-spoken young man from Denton who (at the time of this writing) sits atop the SCCA’s Mid-States Conference Formula Mazda Majors standings with four consecutive class wins, the first pair coming at NOLA and the second brace at Hattlett.
Loomis’ Majors victories follow a first and a second at Texas Region’s Southwest Winter Festival in January, where he also set an FM track record in qualifying, and an inaugural pair of FM wins at Houston Region’s December race. Impressive for anyone, let alone a young man who just turned 16 earlier this year.
“I’ve been racing since I was about 5,” Loomis says. “I love racing. It’s always been part of my life, and it’s basically morphed into a part of me.”
Now looking forward to his junior year at high school, Loomis made his move from karts to FM last year with the help of Moses Smith at Texas Autosports.
“We wanted to move up and try something new,” Loomis says. “My dad talked with Moses and got me a test drive for my birthday. We tested for two sessions, and I instantly fell in love with the car.”
A few weeks later, his dad found a 2000 Formula Mazda and bought it, Loomis adds, and ever since, he’s simply been hooked on the car.
Before the switch to the SCCA and FM, Loomis honed his skills in SKUSA’s shifter karts for Champion Racing, the country’s dominant Intrepid factory team. “I was a Pro Kart factory driver, and we ended up doing some pretty big races,” Loomis notes. “We actually went to Las Vegas for the SKUSA SuperNationals.”
The transition from shifter karts to Formula Mazda has been relatively easy, Loomis says. Smith and his staff at Texas Autosports have been a tremendous help, both to himself and his dad, he explains, as has been the help he’s received over the years from Champion Racing’s Rodney and Brett Berryhill. “I owe a lot to them,” Loomis says. In transitioning from shifter karts to FM, the biggest change “is definitely the speed,” he explains. The karts “got up and went pretty fast, but the cars – it’s amazing how fast they go.”
The new racetracks he’s encountered have impressed him also. “They’re all amazing and they’re all fast. They’re just great. It’s really cool, because a lot of people – especially me – would just dream of going to tracks like these, let alone getting in a racecar and racing on them.”
As for his Hallett weekend, it was not without its challenges, Loomis notes. On Saturday, he finished the race without second gear, which prompted a Saturday-night transmission teardown. On Sunday, the transmission was still giving trouble in qualifying, which, naturally, precipitated an all-hands-on-deck scramble to change out the entire transaxle and gearbox between qualifying and the race.
“This was a new experience for me, since we have never done this before,” he says, “but my dad and I, with a lot of help from the boys at Texas Autosports, were able to get the car ready for the race.”
The race that, as noted earlier, he won – in spite of nearly being collected in an accident.
“Late in the race, as I was lapping the third-, fourth-, and fifth-place cars, who were nose to tail, the third-place car lost control and spun, gathering up the other two cars right in front of me. I was able to avoid most of the accident with only cosmetic damage to my side pod.”
Still, Loomis adds, “It was a really good weekend.” Hallett, he says, “is a technical, driver’s track, and it poses some challenges, which really makes it fun.”
While Loomis hopes that his switch to Formula Mazda is the first step for him in Mazda’s Road to Indy program, he’s also preparing for a college career. His goal, he offers, is to become an engineer. “Actually, right now, I’m taking an engineering-based class called ‘Project Lead the Way,’” he says. A fitting name it is, considering his skills behind the wheel.
Words by James Heine
Images by Mark Weber
