2008 Season opener

This is so neat living out here now and being able to go from the end of one season straight into the next season the following month and have 70 degree weather to boot (albeit a little windy).

The weekend was beautiful for January. The run group set up didn't really allow enough time to do the tire testing that we had wanted to do, so I ended up running the morning session on the old set of tires and mounting the new set in the afternoon.

Will Kalman put together a wonderful, flowing and technical course that showed it's difficulty as my times were still dropping even after 9 runs. The Civic felt very good and we went fast, finishing the day 1/10 behind Leslie Cohen. It was nice talking to Leslie and she test drove our car and told us that our car lacks grip, both in front and the rear, but she is on the 16" rims/tires.

I swapped the new tires on for the afternoon session and was never able to get back to the original time I ran in the morning. I was almost 2 seconds slower in the afternoon. Jason later noticed that I had mounted all the tires backwards. Oops :(

Sunday arrives and my alarm doesn't go off, so Jason wakes me up. Fine way to get a start to the first event. It's a big day. Steve Ekstrand isn't at the event, Paul Whitehead isn't running the Civic and Kyle shows up in an 89 Civic with an absolutely drop dead gorgeous paint job - you could see the paint reflecting, no, glowing in the sunlight. Ken was also registered in STS in his Civic. What a change from last year.

The course is backwards from Saturday with a few twists. Will has put together a tricky course that would take many more runs to figure out what's the fast way. On my first run, on one of the key turns, I enter with my apex cone in sight, then I lose sight of it. By the time I regain site, I'm 20 feet too far away. Minor oops. The run is dirty and worthless.

I spend two more runs trying to go faster and don't beat my first run raw time. After my last run, I'm only about 1/10 faster than Jason and I know the car should have at least another half second in it, so I wait and watch to see if Jason can get a good run in. Unfortunately, Jason isn't able to capitalize on this and we wait now for Ken Motonishi to take his last run to see what the final order is going to be. I see brake lockup during his run and can only wonder if he would still go faster. In the end, the margin of victory is .011 seconds and Ken doesn't even have his car set up properly.

It's nice to have the win, but I'm still wondering what I did wrong because I know the car has more speed in it. It's not till we are packing up that we figure out that the shocks were never set to firm, so we raced on street settings. Guess we learned our lesson on pre-race checks. LOL.

Fun but tiring day with all the delays for the day. Independent of the wind difficulty, it just didn't seem very organized compared to normal events.