How We Did:
Well, as previously mentioned, Kevin pretty much cleaned up in the Modified 4WD (M4) and Overall competition.
Most interesting was the battle in Prepared All Wheel Drive (PA), which was basically about Brian Herring and Keith Vail, with no one else posing a serious challenge. Brian started out by building a big lead, but soon Keith was chipping away at it. When Brian slid off into the shrubs on his last Saturday run (see
http://home.att.net/~kevinmallen/OA_RXchlng_2006_03.jpg) he lost 16 seconds, and Keith sailed into the class lead, even carrying 4 cones.
On Sunday morning Brian recovered his ego and 7.5 seconds, taking back the class lead. But Keith was not out of the game and he matched Brian's times in the afternoon.
BUT, a cone on Brian's first afternoon run - the
finish cone - the
DNF cone - put the whole outcome into question. If this had been a Tarheel event, hitting the finish cone would be a DNF and Brian would go tumbling down the leader board. But what do the DC guys do? Hmm, they give a DNF too, because that's what
we do.
Convening an emergency meeting with Rob and SCCA rep Pego, we conclude that since neither the SCCA rules, nor the supplemental regulations for the event, mention anything about the finish cones, that meant it was just a big cone with a checkered condom, worth 2 seconds like all the others. With that, Brian claims final victory over Keith by a margin of
0.268 seconds out of more than 20 minutes of scored runs. Now
that's racing!
In Prepared Front Wheel Drive (PF), Keith Strassel was struggling, and Chris Suich sort of walked away from him, taking the win by a large margin. I feel bad that I didn't have a chance to talk to Keith during the event to find out if there were particular areas that were giving him trouble. Not to take anything away from Chris's drive, as he beat veteran DC Region competitor Nick Polemini (Volvo 145 in Prepared RWD) on Chris's first time ever at the site. Great drive Chris!
Finally, in Stock Front Wheel Drive (SF), over-aggressive driving on my part led to a lot of mistakes, including 1 stall, 1 use of reverse, and 9 cones, on my way to a sound defeat by a newbie in an SRT-4. In fairness, though, this kid drove smoothly and smartly- his best time on the Saturday afternoon course was second only to Kevin Allen's
overall. I'm looking forward to a rematch!
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