Well, we had a race today!

We showed up at the track at 9:30am and the grounds were soaked, with some nice low-level fog hanging around, along with some not-so-nice looking cloud cover. Many people ruled out the possibility of a racing event happening today. Looking at the weather forecasts, it appeared hopeless. There was no breeze, and no sunlight, and it had been raining for the past two days.

At 10am, PSJ and I decided to open the gates and just have the track charge everyone spectator fee while we waited it out to see if it would improve. We would make a call to go for it or cancel by noon. The track crew got working on the track, with the brush tractor and blow-dryers. Fog started to slowly disappear, and we started to see hints of sunlight poking through the clouds....finally some hope!

The crew at San Antonio Raceway did an awesome job of getting the track dry, despite being soaked for the last two days in rain. We still had alot of water in the shutdown lanes however, so we needed the help of the racers and spectators. We asked for volunteers to get in their cars and do laps on the track to dry up the shut-down lanes. About 30 cars and 30 minutes later, we had the shutdowns pretty dry! Alot of people had some fun ripping it down the track to "help" dry it faster, haha.

Its ON! We knew this weather probably wouldn't last, so we busted *** to get things moving in a hurry. We didn't have a single minute to spare today, we HAD to keep things moving in a hurry. In every single direction you could see storm clouds and rain falling, but not on our track!

We managed to squeeze in two time-trials for every class, and the track crew decided to skip their lunch break to help us keep going. Did I mention they were awesome? We didn't even have time to enter all the driver and car info into the computer, since they typically do that on the hour break. I was in the tower helping out with the tech card sorting, and calling the numbers and getting the info typed in. 71 brave souls laughed at the weather forecasts and showed up to race today. An amazing turnout considering the horrible forecasts. I can only imagine how busy it would have been if the weather forecasts had worked with us

Since we were fighting against Mother Nature, we had to move things quickly. I know some people wished they could get more cooldown time between rounds, or more time to tweak between rounds, but hey, WE WERE RACING! . We timed this event damn near perfectly, as the rain stayed away from our track for nearly 6 hours, and immediately began blowing hard and sideways right after the final payout check was awarded to Tom Kempf. The rain finally found us, but it was too late.

Congrats to all of our winners, and thanks to everyone that travelled hours in rainy crap weather to get here and support the event. Its people like YOU that will make this series grow into something bigger each year, and give us all a series to come play in.

Now, everyone go shop and buy something from our event sponsors, they donated over $10,000 in payout money for this event! Without our awesome sponsors, these events wouldn't be as interesting, because racers enjoy cars, but they LOVE money

Motorsport Technologies
Thunder Racing
Hardcore Motorsports
Horsepower Engineering
Texas Speed & Performance
LG Motorsports
Scoggin-Dickey Parts Center
Nelson Performance
Speed Inc.
Futral Motorsports

Its going to take me a while to write up the results, and I'm tired. I'll get those up tomorrow evening.

Tony

 

Congrats" on getting the race complete.

 

Just think about it for a sec Tony....

If you would have cancelled there would have been a way better turnout and many 8 sec cars to start the season off right.

Mike

 

As an event organizer, I am GLAD to get it over with. Now I can resume a normal life again. Of course I know turnout could have been bigger, but there is always the next event or next season. We had guys drive down from Michigan and Illinois, they deserved to race if we could get it in.

Thanks for everyone that participated! Maybe we should start doing this event in Feb to avoid all the damn March rain.

 

congrats!! Good turnout considering the weather

 

Tony-

The event was very well organized especially considering the oncoming weather conditions. There was some excellent racing and fortunately only a few vehicle related casualties.

I have to give a two thumbs up to Tony, his LS1Tech helpers, MTI, SA Raceway and all the sponsors that made it possible.

It was also nice to meet more great LS1tech members in person like PSJ,Ryan K, Reckless, ZAngel, Brains and many others.

 

Yes as much as we as sponsors would have liked to have made this event with our cars too I'm still glad the event was run and we were there for all the guys that drove in fom so far in spite of the weather. These guys are really dedicated. No one can control the weather but hopefully the rest of the events will have better weather. I know a lot of people stayed home because they were scared to drive all that way and then get cancelled but hey that's racin!

 

Nice launch but, Whos the blonde on the starting line? She looks like a hottie.

Mike

 

It was a little frustrating for me to set and spectate. But at the same time it was nice to just kick back and watch the races. I think it would be better to run in Feb. This is the 2nd year in a row bad weather has hurt attendance. I'm assuming ya'll decided not to set up a ladder because of time/weather threat. Did the staging lane tech pull cards to pair up cars ?

 

Yes, we were going to have time to do qualifying rounds had it not rained, instead we just did time trials for each class. No classes exceeded 16 cars (F/S had 14, Trucks had 13), so we didn't require a qualifying set of runs to get a top 16 field.

We were under the gun pretty hard yesterday to get this race started and finished, if it would have rained just the smallest amount, we would have had to postpone the event for another month. I think the track did an excellent job of keeping things moving, and we seemed to time the event perfectly before the rains came.

Under normal circumstances, there would have been two time trials per class, then two qualifying runs per class, then a ladder would have been set. We didn't even have enough time to enter all the tech card data, they typically do that on the lunch break between qualifying and eliminations. Yes, it sucked that we didn't have time to get the qualifying runs and ladder set, but we had to get the thing rolling ASAP.

Under "normal" conditions, we will have a ladder for each class. It sure makes the racing more interesting. Realistically, only two classes had enough cars to warrant a ladder system, Factory Stock and Trucks. All the other classes had less than 8 entries. The staging lane director pulled playing cards to randomly set the pairs for each class. Right lane vs left lane, so it could have been any of the 5 cars around you.

No Outlaw entries showed up. I guess it was a whole lot of talk, not a whole lot of support afterall . Luckily, I had two sponsor spots still open in the other classes and moved Scoggin-Dickey and Hardcore Motorsports into those two classes to cover the entire field. We are wondering if we should even include Outlaw cars as a class now, we are thinking it should just be an exhibition thing instead.

DMcRacer, thanks for coming out. We are now talking about changing the indexes around for the next events. The 13.00 index only had 3 cars. There were probably 40 cars in the parking lot that could have entered that class, but nobody did. Most of the 13-second cars entered bracket racing instead. It might be wiser to go with an 11.50 and 12.50 index instead. The heads-up class rules were pretty good, and those won't be changed for the season.

 

I agree.

 

I agree with you on the rearrangement of the index classes Tony. You don't really know though until the event is held, but this event showed which direction to go next time. I might have been able to justify going back to Houston after your trailer with a competitive index and that $$$ money incentive.LOL. I have no regrets and was glad to get to share the moment with everyone.

Keep up the good work. I know it's a major pain, but I know it was appreciated by all that showed.

 

11.50 and 12.50 would kick ***, I'd love that

 

Are you sure you're not talking about 2003 SBSO?

February would be awesome, a great break for some of us a little further north of Texas.

 

Congrads!!! I'm sorry I missed it this time, I'll make it next year for sure!

 

I'm too tired to post right now, I got back a few hours ago but have been just chillin' and reading posts. Had a great time.

PSJ
The scale guy with the Futral T-shirt

 

The weather really was a fluke because just a week before the weather was to die for. Thats Texas for ya tho...

I enjoyed the race despite the weather and I was really surprised to see some of the guys from up north; that was cool. Look forward to the North/South cause 'theortically' will should finally see some 32v pushrod action...

 

A stipper down here in Houston.