Flying Pig Makes Final Round at Summit #3

Talk about having fun and going rounds!  The Central Coast Autohaus Flying Pig Racing team had a huge presence at Bakersfeild's Auto Club Famoso Raceway on the weekend of April 30 - May 1.  We were celebrating my birhtday at the track, and we had quite the crew with us.  In addition to Dave "the wrench" Lee and Autohaus Dan, we had Sean, Betche and Lucas from the "friday nite live" crowd, as well as "Autohaus Jamie", and the drivers wife!

Sean, one of the best chefs on Marianela Lane, brought along a boatload of Fillet Mignon, not to mention a concoction he called an "appetizer" that consisted of a sirloin roast butterflied and stuffed with all kinds of good stuff, like garlic and basil, and marinated til it was melt in you mouth tender.  He threw the thing on the BBQ for a while and we started on the adult beverages.  The next couple hours were spent feasting on the best race track food ever.  This is going in the cookbook.  But that's another story.

On the track, we had the best day in, well, a hecka long time.  We made it to our first final round in a very long while, (longer than I care to remember) and although we came up a little short, it was a great day of racing and a nice jump in the points.  In fact it moved us up to #4 in the Summit Pro points for the year. And the car ran really consistantly. That's just so important.  Thanks to Dan and Dave, we have gotten much, much better at keeping the car in a really narrow performance window. That means that we're not changing the set up of the car at all, and all we have to do is follow the weather changes carefully and we can get a lot closer on predicting what the car will run.  We made 8 passes (2 time runs and 6 rounds of eliminations) and 6 of the 8 were within 15/thousands of a second.  That is consistency!!  That combined with a series of pretty competitive reaction times by the driver, and we strung together 5 round wins before facing Mark Kirby in the Grape Ape for the final.  Mark and I had very similar reaction times and we should have been in for a close race, but my hot rod got a little squirelly at half track and I had to pedal a little.  As a result the best we could post was a 10.62 on a 10.45 dial in.  Just way too far off the number to get a win.  But, as they say, a good time was had by all!  And I can't think of a better way to celebrate a birthday!  What a blast!

May 1st brought us to Summit Race #4, and coming off yesterday's final round appearance we had big plans for another stellar day. But that was not to be.  I went out in the first round, when my opponent absolutely chopped down the tree.  I mean a PERFECT .000 reaction time.  Another way of reading that is 1/1000 of a second from a red light (foul)!  It doesn't happen too often in competition but every once in a while someone will rip off a perfect reaction time, and it just happened I was in the other lane.  I ran a 10.53 on my 10.50 dial which is not too bad, but my .086 light left me with over 8/100 of a second to make up.  That just doesn't happen.  So we rolled out of there on Sunday having made a significant jump in points, and having proven we can race with anyone in this series.  Looking forward to climbing further up the points ladder June 11/12!

SLOracer. Out.