We've reached the midway point of our 2011 season and we're finding ourselves with many thoughts and ideas that keep crossing our minds. Was TaG the right direction to move in? Should we have stayed with the Rotax series? Could we have experienced more success had we traveled the Road Race tour instead?
All good questions, but when you get down to the heart of the matter I don't believe we would have found anything more in any other series than the one we landed in. We're just having a bit of bad luck and that can surely come to someone regardless of the series that they're involved in.
Things haven't been going well since the start of this season. It's almost as if we hit the ground in April about as fast as we were ever going to go and we've been back pedaling ever since. Frustration and high expectations of ourselves began to whittle away at any of the fun that we were having until just a few short weeks ago when we had to pull the emergency brake on this effort and regroup. If we were ever going to make this work we had some changes that had to be made. Mainly in the attitude department.
Now find any article that has ever been written on this blog and you will see one common thread: Fun comes first. If you find that you are incapable of conjuring up just one small smile at the end of the day, then you may just have to do some soul searching into whether or not this is for you anymore. And by the way things were looking I didn't feel that we had many days left in this.
It was tough, I'm not going to sugar coat anything here. And the worse thing was that even though I knew that Sam didn't appear to be in it one hundred percent, I myself didn't want to throw in the towel just yet. But seriously, if you don't have the total dedication of everyone involved, especially the guy doing the driving, you're just going to be throwing your money and time down the drain.
We agreed on one week to do some soul searching and I'm glad (and quite relieved) to say that I'm cautiously optimistic that things look like they should turn around for us. A renewed attitude about how we go into these events and what we should expect from them made our last outing register quite a bit south of the "tense" scale.
USair Raceway in Shawano was next on our schedule and we arrived on Friday afternoon to begin our testing. Almost immediately upon our arrival we were to meet our first obstacle which would test our faith. I was informed that our gear set up was incorrect for the track, and to make matters worse I had no spares to fix this situation. Lost day at the track? It sure looked that way, but what could we possibly gain from throwing a fit and elevating every one's temper to an all time high? Thank god for the little birdie that told us to just work with what we had and astonishingly enough we found the combination to be quite fast.
Tolerance, patience, I gotta try these more often.
Two tenths off of a fast lap around the track ain't bad for someone who hasn't seen it in six years. All practice sessions, qualifiers and heat races proved we were in the top five. And out of twenty drivers that wasn't all that bad. Hey, could we possibly have fun again at this?
But all of that would change in the Final. Qualifying fourth, we barely made it around for the parade lap when Sam pulled off the course. Our driver gear had failed and completely sheared every one of its teeth off leaving us with nothing more than dampened spirits and a great seat to watch the race, not to mention a severely thinning checkbook. Aside from the set of tires that took exactly four sessions to completely destroy, I found out how much these drivers cost and let me tell you I'll be checking the condition of mine a little closer from now on.
But the best part of the weekend was the ride home. No tension, no awkward silence, just four people who weathered a storm both on and off the track (mother nature tried to kick our teeth in on Saturday) and who all lived to tell about it. Not in rants, not with too much emotion, just with a smile on our face even if the outcome wasn't what we had hoped for.
Now if all weekends could be this way.
