The fat lady cries, err.. sings.
The final meet of the racing season that was scheduled for this weekend at El Mirage lakebed, has been canceled due to wet weather. A series of rain storms blew into Southern California over the last week, culminating with one on Wednesday that dumped as much as 5 inches of rain in some areas. Although the lakebed only received about 1 inch of rain, there was no chance it could dry sufficiently before the scheduled start of the race, Saturday morning. As a result Roy Creel and the SCTA board made the difficult decision to cancel the race. This was particularly troubling because they had already had to cancel the September meet. Due to scheduling and permitting issues, races can not be postponed, only canceled.
A rainfall map of the Mojave Desert taken
moments before the SCTA was forced to cancel the November meet. El Mirage
is located near the white star.
Although this news is bad for SCTA racing
in general, it isn't all that bad for our team. We were in 5th place in
the association with not much hope of being able to move up in the standings
that meet, so we end the season in 5th place. Not too bad really. It is
easily our best year ever. We are allowed to run our car next year as #5
if we choose and we are now considering whether we want to. As for our
standings in our local club, the Gear Grinders, we end the season comfortably
in first place. We think this is the third time we've done that, but the
other two times were more than 10 years ago.
Because our motor had been damaged at World
Finals, we have been scrambling to get a motor in the car before Friday.
SouthWest Superbikes sent us a 240 HP Nitrous Oxide motor, howerever the
pressure is now off - we will consider our motor plans for next year.
We would like to thank all the people and
companies that have helped out over the last year. A special thanks goes
out to Richard of Southwest Superbikes, John of JE Pistons, Paul of Composite
Sports, and Scott of Ford Electronics.