I was slow, stiff and surrending positions but I had fun! Saturday ======== I was first one out in the first practice session. It was still sprinkling a bit and turn 4 was particularly slippery. No one seemed inclined to pass me despite my slow pace until the last couple laps when the rain stopped. In the next session the track was still damp but I was getting strafed by several of my fellow 250p'ers. I seemed to be having a real hard time with turns 1, 6, and 8-11 for some reason. I've never felt quick in the carousel but I was unusually slow there, I seemed to lack the courage to take the berm-bouncing straight shot through 8, the seam in 9 was unsettling the rear end enough that I felt that I needed to back off some before hitting 10 and, I was having a hard time adapting to the new wet and bumpy turns 1 & 11. Turn 1 struck me as a crash waiting to happen because the fast line runs off the track and through a few feet of dirt. In the final 3-lap session the track was largely dry and I got down to a fairly miserable 2:15. :( Then New Racers School's track portion started so, Frosty and I headed down to the hot pits to cheer 'em on and to pass out water to anybody that wanted it. This also gave a few of my 250p buddies to give me a hard time about my slow pace this weekend. I was bummed out about my times so, I called Speedshop to give 'em the bad news. Jonah was really supportive and basically said not to worry about it. He also said that I should have fun tomorrow and come home in one piece. Nice! Sunday ====== Hey, it was raining! Surprisingly my rear tires belts had already split. Usually that takes about two race weekends and, once it happens, I've noticed that I loose a couple seconds. Maybe I got a bad set of tires or all the sliding I've been doing is really hard on 'em ...or maybe something else entirely. Oh well. Morning practice was just a repeat from the first one yesterday so, I resigned myself to a lack luster race and decided to take Jonah's advice and just make every effort to have fun. Turn 1, 4 and 8 seemed to be popular places to crash from the early races. I was gridded in the second to last row in the race and got a decent launch. Since I didn't really stand a chance of a decent finish I decided to experiment with my starting lines and went deep into turn 1 thinking it would set me up on the inside for turn 2. Instead, it just let everyone blow by me in turn 1, doh. The good news is that there was a small pack of racers that were at my pace so, I got some good dicing in. I must have swapped places with one rider 4 or 5 times (Ben Bracamonte #853?). He finally got away from me with some smooth passing of some slower traffic and when I had to grab a handful of brake in turn 1 to avoid a downed rider. As the race progressed I started to smoothen out a bit. After nearly running into the dirt on turn 1 a couple of times I finally just rode across the dirt on purpose and it worked great. Anyway, fun was had! I finished 28th with a best lap time of 2:11.998. The best thing I can say about that is that I was 1.5 seconds slower than the fastest novice and 5th novice overall. I just might be able to make a serious stab at the top novice after all. :) * Note: Strange, I've heard at least 3 people describe me as really smooth. Hmmmmmm.