RMR Winter Round 5 - Tomadega - Fly Classics Enduro

[Giddyup]

Dun da duh...Sunday, Sunday, Suuuunday....the bad boys of racing are back!

RMRers….team awesome assemble LOL

Dust off 'yer Fly Classics, time to fling them around Tomadega. T2.0 is ready, willing and indeed able to sub in for the Shadow who is on hiatus...something about 6 more weeks of winter?

[Giddyup]

So I think this picture just about sums up yesterday's events



This happened in practice and foreshadowed the events of the day...

To start, We had a bunch of no-shows, which is rare. Only 4 racers came out, a record low for our club. So no teams and with only 4 racers on a 3 lane track, that meant no live marshaling. It's been several years since we've raced this way, but with one marshal, the track call button was used to stop every time we had deslot.

Also, since there wouldn't be much sit out time, we reduced the heats to 3 mins, instead of the usual 6, much to the agreement of our backs and eyes! Badger Bob rolled out his trusty 908/2, while Thomas lit up his Gunston 917k, No Hands 906/6 was pushed up to the starting line with his nubs and Triple T rolled out a previously untested AIR Lola T70.

Racing started off well, or so we thought...about 6 heats in we realized that the lane sensors were not properly assigned to the track lanes within Trakmate. First time I've ever raced myself, and couldn't figure out that while I thought I was leading but the screen showed I was two laps down and kept pushing to regain laps only to be further down! LOL

So we wrapped up the 8 heats, and quite honestly we couldn't tell who finished where. So after a few minutes we figured out what sensors should be assigned where, re-tested and voila, we had laps being counted properly. Since the first round of racing went by so quick we would run another 8 heats.

Simple enough, right? Not quite! We were running the round robin, rotation of timed heats race format which gives you sometime in between to record partial laps, except we had some twitchy fingers on the keyboard in one heat who reset things before we could record. We had another heat that during the marshaling, somehow we only raced for 1/2 the time. So at the end of the race, we had to re-run one heat and go into the race data to capture the other heat where we got the partials but not the actuals laps so our race board had at least a complete picture of the data...

Eventually we got there, in a roundabout sort of way, but at least the cars got their 36 mins of racing in...albeit only the latter 1/2 was properly accounted for. Aside from the day of "technical difficulties", racing went by quickly and everyone got lots of track time and no mechanical failures although No Hands 906 limped over the finish line with a loose rear wheel in the last heat as he willed it to finish!

Tomadega is certainly a technical track but the cars were all pretty evenly matched and a blur to watch!


And oh, did I fail to say that my math also experienced technical difficulties? Sigh....I blame it all on the time change!