Why can't a guy catch a break? This has got to be my worst season start in the 10 years I've been racing...
The venue this time is a municipal airport with a 3950' x 75' runway. This usually equates to a very long / fast / open course which means big FUN! Enough fun to draw a decent crowd from the host club based 2.5 hours away. However, rain was in the forecast and some big players were out of town, so the turnout was small... 14 competitors in total.
The only consolation was that the usual FTD setter was not attending, so FTD was up for grabs. I'd rather beat the region's best obtaining it, but hey... if it's there for the taking why not! And despite the gloomy weather forecast, the rain stopped and the track dried out just as the event was about to start. And I was slotted in the second run group where the track will have already been swept / rubbered in. Things were shaping up for a win! Or were they...
- Run #1: Wow! After two wet events (one on street tires) it was GREAT to feel grip again. I took this run to relearn the limits of the car and feel out the course. It was pretty cone-intensive, but had a nice flow to it. Unfortunately, the sea of cones got the better of me and I missed one resulting in an O/C.
Run #2: After talking with the officials I got a general idea of where I had gone off course (O/C), then set off for my second run. However, I apparently didn't fully understand because I did the exact same thing again... O/C
Run #3: On this run I finally got it right. Made it 3/4 the way through the course clean then got red flagged due to a timer malfunction. D'oh! Oh well, I'd get a rerun.
Run #4: Good run. No cones. Cleaned up a few minor mistakes I had made previously. I didn't have time to check my result though... had to get right back in the queue to do my rerun.
Run #5 (rerun): Confident that I had finally put a solid time on the scoreboard, I decided to push a little harder on this last run. A little too hard in fact, as i locked up the brakes going into a tight section and bypassed it completely. No point in trying to recover... I abandoned the run and head straight into the pits.
Over to the timing trailer I go to see what time I got in my one good run... WTF? Off course! Every single run of mine was scored as O/C. Argh! So I asked the timing & scoring guys to look up my runs so I could at least see what my raw times were. But the computer only listed two runs under my name and both were erroneous. Argh!
So there I was, having finished the event with NO times whatsoever, and placing dead last. Yay for me!
I was determined to get at least ONE time to see how I would have fared, so I participated in the fun runs after the event. And wouldn't you know it... On my very first fun run I came in with a clean run which was a whole 3 seconds faster than FTD. I then backed it up with another run. I should have OWNED that event. But instead I came in dead last.
The next day I looked back at my on-board videos and desperately tried to figure out where I went off course on run #4 but I could find nothing. So i posted it on the local forum for review and no one else could see any problems with the run neither. No one knows who or why it was called O/C. It appears to have simply been a mistake. I was robbed!
Oh well, it doesn't really matter in the end. It was just a club-level event and there's nothing really at stake besides pride. I'll get my day in the sun yet!
Here are a couple videos of my runs. To view more, check out my
YouTube channel.
