This week's NASRL Vintage Series event was at Riverside -- we're now past the mid-season point and we've switched over from the "little" Touring Cars (TC) to the bigger Gran Touring (GT) cars, which means Mustangs and Falcons and speed, oh my!

Everybody chose Mustangs except for the winner, Miguel de Raton, who wisely went with a Falcon. All the Mustang drivers seemed to choose the same car, because aside from Miguel's Falcon, my yellow Group 5 Mustang, and one lone blue Mustang, all the other cars in the field were either red or red-and-white, which made for a rather bland race for the spectators.

This I know, because I ended up spectating for the last half of the race after suffering engine failure on Lap 13. This marked my first NASRL Vintage Series DNF, but not as disappointing as it could have been -- in fact, I'm only disappointed that I missed out on running the entire race with you guys!

I turned in a decent enough qualifying run, right up there in close proximity to my personal best in testing, so I can't complain about that. The rest of you were freaking SPEED DEMONS, though, because my qual run was only worth an 8th-place spot on the grid (according to last season's race report, my qual time would have been good enough for a top-5 starting spot last time around!).

At the start I must have been totally asleep at the switch, because all of a sudden everybody was accelerating but me, so I got it into gear and brought up the rear going into T1.

I tip-toed through the first couple of laps, but unlike last week we had a VERY clean start (kudos to everybody, especially those in front of me!). I was hot on Gord Champerlain's tail for the first few laps, and we went side-by-side a couple of times before I finally took the lead and then pulled ahead on Lap 3.

After that, I maintained a pretty good clip, nearly equalling my qual run on lap 5, then maintaining a consistent pace in the 1:39 range after that.

Up ahead of me Bryce Aston must have bobbled a couple of times because by Lap 7 I had closed to within 2 seconds of him. He was quicker than me for the most part and had managed to open up the lead to 4 seconds by Lap 9. While following him I noticed that Bryce was faster than me through Turn 9, which is where he was managing to pull away from me the most, so I tried to follow his line . . . tried unsuccessfully, because I ended up doinking my front-end on the concrete tyres when my rear came around unexpectedly while trying to brake aggressively to follow Bryce's line.

I got on the brakes hard but still ended up hitting the tyres. Black smoke rolled from my hood briefly, but other than that nothing seemed amiss and I was able to get myself turned-around and back on-track without losing any position. My little "off" gave Bryce a 12-second lead over me, so I decided to just nurse the car for a few laps to try to assess the damage.

My handling didn't seem too compromised and I managed to maintain my position. I thought I saw the occasional wisp of black smoke in the cockpit but I couldn't be sure, so I just pressed on, hoping for a decent finish.

Alas, my engine sputtered, lost power, then let go in a cloud of black smoke on the uphill section on Lap 13, forcing my retirement. The race report listed "suspension failure," but it sure seemed like my engine let go.

The mistake at Turn 9 was fairly stupid -- I don't recall ever losing the car there during practice -- but overall I wasn't too disappointed. A mistake is a mistake, and even though it was a self-induced mechanical failure, it still wasn't as bad as it could have been. Going into the race, I had visions of my race ending with a catastrophic high-speed collision with the concrete tyres on the fast uphill section (something I did many, many times in practice), so being taken out by a minor "off" on a relatively tame section of track was almost anti-climatic.

Congrats to everyone on a clean race -- even with a DNF this was a fun week!

We'll be taking a break over Memorial Day, then it's back our next Vintage GT run at Hidden Valley.