Hot day in Fontana

Hot hot day today with a forecast high of 90 degrees. Yesterdays practice was cancelled because of gale force winds. I was in class yesterday and missed practice, but checked the weather for today and it was forecast to be a lot calmer. It's been a few weeks since the last race and it will be a few more weeks before the next race. I was really looking forward to todays race.

However, starting around lunch time yesterday, I started getting a body ache, and felt nauseous if I ate anything. I did as much sleeping as I could. I wanted to be able to race today.

I slept all the way to Fontana while my wife drove. We got the kids ready for their race. Both kids ran their go karts on the big course. It was the first time for my son on the big course. Exciting day. George still can't pronounce our last name. It was pretty funny listening to him butcher our last name.

Once they were done running, I went back to sleep and I slept until Jason arrived in the Civic. By the time Jason arrived, I felt better. I still didn't have an appetite. I had managed to eat one bagel all morning and some water. I took it easy until race time.

The course was a rather simplistic looking course with a few tight spots and lots of sweepers. It didn't look too complicated. However, driving it correctly turned out to be a big challenge, not just for me, but for many people too. I coned my first run (same cone as Jason), DNF'd my second run, had a clean run on the 3rd attempt and DNF's the 4th run. I had no idea what position I was in. It should have been a decent position because the time was pretty good. With the competitive class we run in, I wasn't sure if it would be enough to win.

As it turns out, it was not enough to win. Seb beat me to the line by somewhere by .2 seconds. Crazy Seb - nice driving. Notably missing were Jon on his new Hankooks, which should have done well in the heat and Jeff Wong. Wonder what happened?

Jason was turning in good scratch times, but in an atypical fashion, was plagued by cones all day (usually it's me) and ended up further down the pack.

The pax results (adjusted to rank all 182 drivers against each other independent of class) shows me in 7th spot out of 182. With what I feel was a subpar performance from me, to me, that's another clue that the course was more difficult than I had imagined at first. I wasn't expecting to place so high for this event.

Now the long wait until the next event at the end of June :(