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Merry Christmas folks! REMINDER: You Southern Series guys can put that vacation request in for the first week of June this year -- June 3rd through 8th. This will be the second annual USMTS Southern Series Speedweek and the Wednesday through Saturday have already been booked. We're planning on racing Tuesday night through Sunday night. 6 tracks in 6 nights so plan one of those vacation weeks for the first week of June!
Well, as most of you know, we didn't start out that good though. If we had been that good from the start on Thursday some of those Mods that broke or left would have still been there and I believe we would have picked up a few more too. 75 to 80 on Saturday night would have been very likely.
Larry and his track crew did on Saturday night what they've been doing all year at HRP and that's providing a fantastic racing surface. You have to love that new layout and the USMTS Modifieds didn't disappoint anybody when they finally got that surface with the show they gave. If you get a chance to see Sprint Cars, ASCS, SUPR or USMTS at HRP in 2008, don't miss out. You'll regret it, I guarantee! In fairness to the track-prep for Thursday though, there isn't exactly a "book" on what the race track needs on Nov 29th, 4 days after a 4-inch rainfall. They were in kind of new territory there. It was too wet to even get on the track until Wednesday morning. The result was a brutally rough racetrack that really tore some cars up on Thursday and resulted in a couple guys calling it a weekend early. We'll just call Thursday's race "The Rodeo". Probably should have r---ned out Thursday and just gone with Friday-Saturday but the weather was so nice, you know that wouldn't have went over too good....but after the fact, hinesite, yea. Rainout.
Beginning with the end of Thursday night's program and into Friday, the crew hit the track with only one thought in mind -- smooth out the race track. And they did. And after what happened Thursday, they didn't dare add any more water. Anyway Friday's track was what it was -- dry, slick and one-groove around the bottom so we'll just call Friday night's race "The Train" race.
All of this had Larry and I both kind of walking quickly and avoiding eye contact with racers. Me because I ran my mouth and fingers about how great this weekend was going to be and Larry, a super-nice guy by the way (he even went half away around the racetrack Saturday night to fetch my glasses when they were 3 feet to my left the whole time....oops...), because after getting hammered with rain over the Thanksgiving weekend was trying to making it happen and wasn't having much luck up till now. Larry and his track prep crew nailed it Saturday night though! You could tell during hot laps that we were going to see something special Saturday night. Larry called it, "Their normal Saturday night track." Wow, are you folks in Houston ever lucky! They have a term for sporting contests that I use a lot. It's for events that keep your attention riveted on them. They call such events, "barnburners". I think it goes back to the old country days when someone's barn building burning down attracted a crowd. At first it was to help put it out and then just to watch it burn if they couldn't. They didn't have TV or much else entertainment I guess. Anyway, we'll call Saturday's race, "The Barnburner"! It was more good than the other nights were bad.
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