Photo credit: Gavin Baker Photography

There are some teams in the USF Pro Championships paddock which enter with semitrucks full of professionally-prepared cars with full teams of staff with matching outfits.

Benchmark Autosport has none of those. Sitting in a small tent off in the back corner, they’d be indistinguishable from an elaborate trackside camping setup if not for Ayrton Houk‘s car, and a small team of dedicated family friends working on the car.

But yet, at USF2000’s marquee race of the series, Indianapolis Raceway Park’s Freedom 75, Ayrton Houk and Benchmark Autosport didn’t just come out for qualifying and fight alongside teams five times their size, they surpassed them.

Against all odds, Houk got pole position for tonight’s race. He ran a 41.9474 across two qualifying laps, beating out Jay Howard Driver Development’s Anthony Martella by three hundredths of a second.

“It absolutely feels amazing,” Houk said after qualifying first. “It’s great to get our first pole at the hometown of Indianapolis, gonna have a ton of friends and family coming out tomorrow.”

Of all drivers on the grid, Houk wears his hometown of Indianapolis on his sleeve perhaps the proudest. While other teams carry sponsors from across the world to the grid, Houk is sponsored by local businesses, with Binkley’s, a bar just a half-hour from the track he’ll start first from, sitting on the front of his car.

But despite the unassuming setup, the team carries more expertise than meets the eye.

The team is in their first year on grid, an endeavor propelled by Ayrton’s father Kevin Houk alongside Don Conner, a race engineer who has won a total of six USF2000 championships.

“It’s our first career pole and it’s great for the team,” Ayrton Houk said. “You can see, we’re just under a couple of E-Z Ups at the back of the grid as a one-car team.”

So far, Houk is coming off of his two best finishes with Benchmark at the two-race round on the Indianapolis Motor Speedway road course, finishing 8th and 7th.

Houk is confident that if he can manage his tires well throughout the race, the team might be in it to pick up their first win at a track which is notoriously hard to pass at.

And it’s one that, for the driver from Indiana, could just mean more in his hometown.

“We’re excited and we’re happy,” Ayrton Houk said. “But we gotta stay focused on the goal ahead, put our heads down and go out and finish the job tomorrow.”

The Freedom 75 will begin