Huge congrats #1 to Alex Barroso for NASA-SE rookie of the year. Not only did he kick ass all year, BUT…he beat Skeen’s track record at RA this weekend. Sure, Skeen’s record was on RA1’s, but we’ve been on RR’s for a long time now and Skeen’s record still stood. It took Alex Barroso to beat the record.
Huge congrats #2. We made it thru the whole year w/o destroying a single car. That’s the first year we’ve done so in, I dunno, maybe forever. I remember years when we were destroying an average of 1 car every 3 months. There were some dark years. You guys are racing each other like you’re buddies. You’re giving each other room to survive. YOU…ARE…AWESOME! Every single month next year I’m going to remind you of the # of months since we’ve destroyed a car. Lets see if we can make it another year. Of course, if someone makes an unforced dumb-ass mistake and crashes themselves into a wall, that’s on you, not on the group . Don’t be that guy.
Race report. My Sunday race was so crazy that I can’t hardly even remember Saturday’s race. The guys voted for a standing start. Since it was a non-points race, we inverted the field. The start was kinda confused. We had guys in the front row that weren’t used to being there and I was concerned about them quickly moving to the right start point. There was indeed some confusion up front and when it all got sorted out, I was a little closer to Ty Young in front of me, then the 1.5 car lengths or so I’d have preferred.
Stalling at VIR in a standing start a couple months ago was first and foremost in my mind.
Ty is pretty serious so I figured he’d start hard and bolt right or left to get around the guy to his front. As a result, I didn’t really have a contingency plan. Which worked out poorly. The green dropped, I roared forward and Ty didn’t move and inch. I was caught flat footed and did not have room to get around him so I had to come to a stop on his bumper. Then he roared forward and I went too. But the damage was done.
About 3secs later someone to my left bolted right and came within a whisker of side-swiping me. Lady luck was shining on us both and all that connected was our mirrors. A turn or two later I popped my driver’s mirrors back into place thinking “holy shit.”
There were more adventures, to include Ty and Robert going off in single file at 1, and Davis Aikins passing me at 10a just prior to the checker, but I’ll put together the video of all of that this week. It was really really fun.
That said, there was several times in that damned Sunday race when I thought we were gonna cream 1/2 the field. I’d just congratulated everyone for making it thru the year w/o killing any cars, and then the very last race of the year, a no points race that was inverted BECAUSE OF ME, all the sudden looked like it was going to be a disaster. In that first lap, there was, I dunno, 4x I thought to myself “OMIGOD< WHAT HAVE I DONE?!!!”
Thank god we made it w/o any cars getting killed. I’d never forgiven myself otherwise.
