This past weekend I embarked on my final race of 2018 to Myrtle Beach for the annual fun filled Fall Brawl event. This track is always a blast to drive on. They get it super smooth and it grooves up as the days go along. The biggest challenge is picking the right tire for the right time of day and track condition. Overall In the morning and evening runs we were running clay tires (AKA Typo and Chainlink for me) and then on a midday sunny run if the groove was out then SLW was good. (Impacts were surprisingly really easy to drive and pretty fast too!)
On Friday afternoon/Evening we decided to do one qualifier to finish out the night as their was rain in the forecast for the weekend. In Nitro buggy I started off great as the first heat of the class and got onto a 12 lap pace. But I just got a little nervous for some reason and made a couple mistakes and dropped me back loosing around 7 seconds. I would end up 6th for the round which was unfortunate because my pace was a TQ one. :-/ In truggy I had a very unlucky start as a mechanic and marshal were standing at the end of the straight away as I started the clock and I got into them and cartwheeled off the track. I had another mistake on the next lap on my own and would have to setting for coming back to 3rd.
On Saturday morning we started early with Q2 and watched the forecast closely. In buggy I was battling with Joe for a while for the #2 spot but ended up crashing on the front right jump and fell to 6th before recovering up to 3rd by the end. My car felt good overall, just need to cut out the mistakes. In truggy I was on a great run even though my tires weren’t the right ones for the condition. For sure a clay tire would have been better but I was still managing to lead the pack on my SSLW Grids and with just a couple laps left I rolled it over relegating me back to 3rd again.
Shortly thereafter the skies opened and we went on rain delay. Many of the participants went to Dave and Busters and we had some lunch and played some games. Then I overheard the guys next to us saying they were going bowling….And I do enjoy a game of bowling. So after finishing up Joe, Matt, and I headed to the bowling alley where they were already on their 2nd game about 3 frames in. They said I could jump in with them so I proceeded to grab my lane shoes and they let me use one of the house balls they had found that just happened to have fingertip grips and was reactive resin. I proceeded to throw the first 7 strikes in a row and finish with a 268! One of the top 10 games of my life so that was a lot of fun!
