Date: October 19, 2003
Venue: Dolaca Motorplex - Brownfield, TX
Results: 1st in Class (6 total), 3rd Overall (44 total)
What a long and tiring day! I left my house at 6:45am and got to the event at 9am, so I had plenty of time to get the car unloaded and ready, help with registration, and walk the course as many times as possible. Jim Gore and Ronald Ashford already had most of the course set up by the time I got the car unloaded off the trailer, but the timing equipment and event forms had not arrived yet, so I decided to start walking the course while I had a chance. After a few walks, the course seemed like it would be a good challenge and was pretty simple to memorize, so I didn't think I'd have any problems. Our normal registration time starts at 10:30am, but the timing equipment and event forms didn't show up until about 11am, so the event was off to a very late start. We also had 44 competitors show up to race, so we had to cut the entries down to 2 per person (6 runs per person instead of 9). The first car started out onto the course at around 1:30pm instead of the normal 12 noon start time. The event finally ended at 7pm, and I got home at 9:45pm.
I worked during the first heat, and there were a few cars running pretty quickly through the course. There were a lot of people getting confused on certain parts of the course and DNFing, but as they ran a few times, everyone started to figure it out. Steve Sucsy set the fastest PAX time during the first heat in his B-Stock Honda S2000, while Jim Gore was able to set the fastest raw time of the first heat in his B-Modified open wheel Formula Ford. Hisham Besheer and Jeff Maddox brought out their 125cc shifter karts for this event, so I knew I wouldn't be able to get fastest raw time of the day, but thought I might be able to get fastest PAX time... I was wrong. While making my runs through the course, I realized that it was much tighter than I'd thought it would be while walking the course and it had way too many transitions for me to put up a good fight with the shifter karts. The M3 still handled great, but it was just too tight. The course was obviously not as tight for the smaller shifter karts and they were able to buzz through it all fairly easy compared to the rest of the cars. Hisham was able to walk away with first place Overall as well as fastest raw time of the day. My fastest run got me first place in Street Modified and third place Overall, which was only 0.770 seconds (PAX) behind Jeff Maddox. My fastest raw time was the fastest of all the other production cars and even faster than the three open wheel formula cars that were running in the Modified classes, so if it weren't for those damn shifter karts, I would've gotten fastest PAX and RAW time of the day. The good news is that with the points that I acquired during this event, I am now sitting in third place in the WTRSCCA Open Championship points standings!
I'm thinking about designing the course layout for the next (last) race of the season, which is back at Dolaca Motorplex on November 16th, so hopefully I can put everybody on a more level playing field with the course layout.