AFM Round 3 - Infineon
It looked like rain, and rain it did. I got two practice sessions in Saturday morning before the skies opened up and ruined everyone's afternoon. My bike was working great, as always. I had the second fastest laptime in the slowest practice group; hopefully next round they'll bump me up to group 2. Honestly though I think that my peers were just a little bit disturbed by the cold, cloudy weather. I just told myself to be smooth as always, do most of my braking straight up and down, and trust that faster riders can do much faster laptimes on my bike despite the chill in the air.

I was really looking forward to racing Clubman again; Clubman is a novice race the AFM runs on Saturday afternoons. Typically once you race clubman and beat the qualifying laptime by three seconds or more you're not allowed to race it anymore, but they just relaxed the rules to allow you to run the race twice after spanking the qualifying time to allow for new racers to get more experience. But it started dumping rain around 11 a.m. and finally around 2:30 they called it a day and canceled all the clubman races. Oh well!

My first race on Sunday, Formula IV, was the first race of the day. There was one round of practice sessions, then a riders meeting, the national anthem and away we went. I was hesitant the first half a lap because I had much less faith in my fellow riders to not bin it while running around, vying for position, so I unhappily took a spot towards the back of the pack and set about trying to work my way back up.

I was riding well until the lap after I passed Brian Paoletti. Coming out of turn seven and into some esses, I kind of "forgot" that there was another left hand kink coming out of them and was headed for the dirt. I tried meekly to make it and then decided I would just ride through the dirt and back onto the track where the track turned right again. Brian passed me back, but then I passed him again somewhere. I was finding that I was faster than my peer group going through the carousel; people seemed timid about carrying corner speed through there. But then I was weakest going into seven and nine, the turns requiring heavy braking after quick straights. An occasional rider would sneak by me there.

Then, I was battling with Mike Adrian, a rider who was impossibly slow at the last race. I couldn't get over how much quicker he was, and it infuriated me that I was behind him. I passed him in the carousel, then he passed me back in nine. On the last lap, I passed him in the carousel again, thinking that I hopefully would have him this time, but then he snuck by me again going into nine. He even hesitated, unsure that he really had it, and I could have counter-stuffed to his stuffing me. But I didn't. Oh well. It's only club racing. But god damnit I wanted to beat him! Zoe, another girl racer on an SV, was gridded ahead of me, got a stronger start and stayed solidly in a pack ahead of me, but my laptime was still better than hers. I ended up with a 1:56.2 best laptime, my best ever at that track.

650 Twins was an unbelievable disaster. Not for me, but for many others. It was mayhem around every turn! Crash here, crash there. They ended up having to roll an ambulance and then restarted the race. After the restart, the mayhem continued, and another ambulance scurried out onto the track. Another restart. At this point, Shandra Crawford and I were stopped in turn 7 with a pack of riders, waiting for track officials to decide where to send us while the medics did there thing. She called the chaos "bowling for bikes." Pretty descriptive turn. Both she and I were apprehensive about going back out there after yet another restart, but James encouraged me, saying, "but there's gonna be fewer riders out there! Of course you're going back out!"

"Okay fine," I thought. I also thought that if Shandra went back out, I'd feel lame for not going back out too. So I did. I was much more hesitant on the start and got a spot towards the back, as usual, and then worked my way back up to 33rd (out of 37) by the end of the race.

James won Open Superbike and Formula Pacific, which was really exciting. He got a bad start and was in fifth going into turn 2, but then worked his way up to first, ending it with a four second lead over David Stanton. We ended the day at a cute little bar in Glen Ellen with Josh, the Pirelli guy, and his girlfriend. We got along great at the track and overall I can't complain about a thing (except for not beating Adrian and Zoe, grr)!

I also had a new "outfit" (James likes to make fun of me for wanting to match suits with helmets):