What a race! I chose the Alfa Jr. because I just couldn't find speed AND consistency with any other car. I did manage to put together a good setup and I got pretty consistent with the Alfa during practice throughout the week, so I knew I SHOULD be able to run in the 1:39 range throughout my full fuel run with no problems.

Sunday was a busy day, though, and unlike most weeks I didn't get a chance to turn ANY offline laps at all before joining up for official practice online. I was tired by the time the race rolled around, so I had no expectations going in.

My 11th place qualifying run was no surprise -- about what I had expected. What I hadn't expected was how "off" I was during practice . . . I just couldn't seem to get myself in-sync with the car and the track, and I found myself constantly chasing the car and fighting with understeer that I had never experienced with the setup I had used during practice throughout the week.

Towards the end of qualifying I began to realize it was me more than it was the setup -- I had too much adrenaline going on, I was over-cooking it going into the turns, missing my turn-in, and carrying too much speed through the turn, thus resulting in the previously-unseen understeer.

Knowing what the problem is and fixing it are sometimes two different things, though, and I continued to push too hard during the first few laps of the race, but I finally managed to find my groove and settled in for a more-or-less consistent run.

I picked up a spot or two at the start -- I was watching the timer in my HUD along with the starting lights, and when I saw the timer start to tick off the seconds I knew the lights had changed. The starting lights didn't look like I had expected them to look, though, so without the HUD timer I would have been a lot slower off the line. I think the lights caught several people off-guard because I jumped from 11th to 8th on the start, which caught me off-guard because I couldn't recall if we had a "no-pass" rule on the first lap or not.

I continued to push on, figuring that I'd accept any penalties one way or the other.

Sitting in 8th place I dogged the 7th-place Alfa in front of me, reducing the gap from a 5-second lead down to a nose-to-tail run through the twisties, while the the guys behind me dogged me like crazy in turn, trying to get past or to get me to screw up.

Consistency paid off in the end, though, because I managed to outlast the Alfa driver, who eventually bobbled going into T1, thus allowing me to slip past for 7th (still haven't watched the replay, so I have no idea who was in front of me). A couple of other cars got by as well, one being the TR4 of Bill Guillaume, who had been dogging early on, then dropped back as I closed-in on the 7th-place Alfa. Hot on my tail yet again Bill was putting in some herculean laps keeping up with me. He almost got past me a couple of times, but didn't seem to have quite enough to take me down the start/finish straight. He was faster than me though some of the twisties, but I always managed to open the gap up a bit at the Chicane just before the start/finish straight -- I think Bill's TR4 was a bit more unstable than my Alfa over the Chicane "traffic island," which gave me the edge I needed to hold him off on the high-speed run up to T1.

Bill eventually managed to get inside me around lap 20 or 21 going through the Virage du Lycee hairpin and I lost sight of him -- I couldn't see him in my mirror so I wasn't sure if he was on my right or if he had lost it and spun in the hairpin, and I was too busy accelerating and searching my mirror to risk a glance to the right. Bill must have been directly off my right rear-quarter panel, though, because I started to drift wide through the big left-hand sweeper at Avenue de Musset; I felt a bump indicating contact, then I saw Bill's blue TR4 skitter across the track behind me in my rearview mirror. I lifted slightly, unsure of whether this constituted the type of thing that would invoke the "pull over and wait" rule -- once I saw that Bill was neither off-track nor spinning, I got back into the throttle because I figured Bill was probably okay, and I assumed that since he wasn't off-track this probably wouldn't qualify as the type of contact that would require the "pull over and wait" courtesy.

Bill dropped back and was never able to establish contact with me again, so I didn't see him for the remainder of the race. Unfortunately, I learned after the race that the incident had damaged Bill's suspension, and shortly thereafter he planted it in some tyres, forcing his retirement.

My apologies, Bill -- you gave me a good run, you drove a clean race, and you deserved a much better finish than you got. I know you said in the post-race chat that it was one of those "just racing" incidents, and I know I didn't take you out through outright negligence, but I still feel bad that you were the one who came out worse for wear.

:-(

I continued on after the brush with Bill, somewhat shaken and definitely tired. In the closing minutes of the race, Barret Erickson began nipping at my heels with his Arbath -- I managed to fend him off for the last lap, desperately clinging to my 7th-place position. As we crossed the start/finish line and got the "race over" message, I noticed that my HUD somehow showed me in 5th position -- without ever having passed a car on the final lap! I see that Bryce reported in his post-race report that he had to pit for a black flag penalty which would account for one position, but I still have no idea where the other position came from.

This marks my best finish ever in a NASRL event, and at the end of the day I feel like I definitely earned my 5th-place finishing spot -- I was fast enough to fend off some equally-fast guys, consistent enough to make fewer fatal mistakes than some of the guys who were faster than me, and composed enough to maintain my postion even under considerable pressure.

Zandvoort is on the schedule for next week, and that should prove interesting -- with only 3 rental points at my disposal, I'll probably show up in either a Mini or a Lotus Elite . . . neither of which seem particularly well-suited for a fast track like Zandvoort.

Should be fun, though, regardless!

:-)