I'm just sitting in my room right now wondering about my weekend... If any of you follow the amateur circuit in the US, then you know Loretta Lynn's is one of the most prestigious races to do. Just qualifying for it is hard. Heck, even qualifying to the regional is difficult! Well I tried to get to Loretta Lynn's this past weekend and this is what happened...
We left late Thursday night after preparing and packing everything up for the weekend. It usually isn't a good idea to start a 6 hour drive at 10:30 at night, but my dad and I decided to do it anyway. My dad seemed like he was going to fall asleep at any moment and was doing really weird things to stay awake. We wanted to get to a rest area to sleep, but none seemed to come up anywhere! That was pretty scary. Once we did get to a rest area, we didn't even sleep. My dad decided to keep sleeping! But it was all ok in the morning when we arrived at the track.
Friday was just a day of practice, but a lot of it! I signed up for two classes so I got in 6 practice sessions. I found out two things that day: the track was going to be really rough that weekend and I was going to have a hard time. Great!
The next day, Saturday, was the day that racing started. My three classes were all split into two divisions. That meant that I had to get top 16 in each of those to qualify for the 2nd and 3rd motos. I got 15th in the first 450 B Mod moto, so I made it to the next ones. But I didn't get top 16 in my 250 B Stock and Mod classes. Uh oh! But it ended up going fine. My 250 B Mod last chance qualifier actually went really well. I got the holeshot and led for 2 out of 3 laps! I ended up getting passed and battling, which resulted in me getting 2nd. But that was still awesome!
My second last chance qualifier was 250 B Stock. I kind of wheelied off the start, so I didn't get the holeshot, but I was still up there. I think I got 3rd in that race. I forgot to mention, both lcq's only had 8 and 7 racers in them, so everyone qualified! A lot of us didn't really see a reason to race that, but we did anyway.
That night we went to a hotel that some of our friends were staying at to pay a visit to the pool and hot tub. That was good for sure. My dad and I just slept in our van in the parking lot. :P
The next morning our van had a dead battery, but we still got it started thanks to good old jumper cables! Whew! And then we were off for our last day at the Baja Acres Mid-East Regional. That was the coldest of the days we were there. I think it was in the mid-70's. It was cloudy all day, but we were pretty sure it wasn't going to rain. There was a chance of rain for all weekend. But barely any came!
That day, Sunday, my motos all went pretty similarly. I would have to start near the outside in every race, and then I would have to battle near the back of the pack. In one of my 250 classes I actually got taken out and ran over on the last lap. I'm pretty sure both of those things were accidents... at least the running me over part was!
The challenging track gave me a 22nd overall in 450 B Mod, 22nd overall in 250 B Mod, and 25th overall in 250 B Stock. Not that bad considering each class had as many as 60 guys in it in the beginning!
So I didn't qualify for Loretta Lynn's, but I think I got some good experience racing with all those super fast guys. That's why Loretta Lynn's is so big...
I guess there's always next year! :D
No comments:
Post a Comment