It was a wonderful event. Many thanks in particular to the announcer in Group 2, who helped fire up the fight between myself and Gwen as we went back and forth by mere slivers of time. It was an absolutely epic battle, and the announcer made sure we (and everyone else) knew it!
That was absolutely the best, most awesome, brilliant, and most fun way ever to lose a season, and I had SO MUCH FUN doing it. Neither of us could ask for a better way to decide the year. Congratulations, Gwen, on the HS season victory!
If you missed it, Gwen and I bested each other by hundreths and thousandths on our runs, and finally I lost the fight by making a great 95% of a run and then coning it away within about 20 yards of the finish. Awesome.
Tech tip: The Hoosiers were warm by about 1/4 of the way around the first sweeper, and stuck well without any spraying for 3 runs. With the smaller group size and shorter gap between runs, however, they were definitely a bit greasy for the 4th run -- I should have sprayed them down before that.
Procedural note: Grid was hard to work in group 4. Part of it was that people spread themselves out like a normal group instead of parking next to each other. The real catch, though, was the two-driver cars. With the small group and short runs, it was all I could do to give them a chance to get out and check pressures or whatever before they needed to run again. Even keeping down to just a 5-7 car separation between runs for them, I eventually ran out of single-driver cars to put between them and felt obliged to apologize for having an empty start line in order to avoid back to back hot runs.
That said, the system worked as well as possible. To make it a little easier, I'd like to see people on the single-driver side closer together, and the two-driver grid again parked close to each other but halfway down the grid. I found the pattern of "run half the singles, then run the 2-drivers, run the other half of singles, run the 2-drivers while dashing back to the other end of the singles" to be the best to keep cars in line.
It seemed to work well enough, but my usual goal of having the third in waiting line roll up as the car at the line takes off gave way to a more irregular 2 to 5 lined up at various times. But like I said, it worked.
Two heats vs. all-at-once: The great announcing and easily seen times made all-at-once brilliant and exciting. If either of those couldn't happen (as at some other events for technical reasons) then it would have lessened the impact of being able to compare heat 1 times before going back for the rematch of heat 2. But on this event, this day, it was great.
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Martyn Wheeler
AXing Kit's '05 Mazda 3, #29 HStock
(when
The Gonzo Symphonic allows)
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I think that would have been the place to left foot brake - oh well, I think I'll start turning my car into a CSP car.....
