Awesome Sunday

Jason and I arrived bright and early on Sunday morning to walk the course. On Saturday, we had two separate courses, one on the left side and one on the right side. We were expecting that some connection would be made in the crossover to connect both courses. However, the course was substantially redesigned - into what I consider to be easily the most interesting and difficult course I've seen in SoCal since I've been here. Kudos to Mike Simanyi for a wonderful course.

I felt this course was difficult because of a number of things:
1. The length of the course - approximately 1 mile in length with lots of transitional elements and key apexes that had to be remembered.
2. The speed of the course - much faster in transitional elements than the majority of courses we see.
3. The number of slaloms. Given the size of the lots here, we don't typically see a lot of slaloms and here we had some that were absolutely flat out - at least in the Civic.

This was shown in the big spread in times with several experienced drivers DNFing all their runs. I think in our run group, of the first 10 runs, 4 were DNFs, 4 had cones and only 2 runs were clean.



It was a hot and long day. We didn't start our first run until around 5PM. Hard to remember the course after waiting all day. My first run was in the 76's with one cone. I was a little more than a second behind Steve O'Blenes and Jeff Barco, both driving Ken Motonishi's Civic. Both our Civics were on Falkens. I hit one cone on my second run and since I came to race rather than worry about points, I decide not to go easy just to get a clean run and end up dirty for all my runs. All cones were silly ones. Ekstrand and Whitehead were both on the new Bridgestone RE-01R's. If we just compare raw times, this is the first time I've managed to beat them straight up (of course I had to be clean for it to count). I wonder if the Bridgestones don't have as much of an advantage on such a grippy surface or on transitional stuff...

The car was running like a champ and I'm happy with the raw times, even if hitting cones negates the real time. Moe has done an awesome job on the engine. Now we need a higher redline so that we can run without shifting as much. We had to use 3rd gear 3 times on this course. We'll work on this aspect next.



The main disappointment was that the video wasn't working on what I consider to be the most interesting course to video. Oh well..