Cleveland 2005

[Blake]

Hi all,


Well, we're all packed up and ready for tomorrow's drive to Cleveland.  We'll be offline for the next 24 hours.  Talk to you soon.


Blake

[Grinder]

Woohoo!  We're all rooting for you up here

[Blake]

Frick, I just found an ethernet jack in our hotel room here in Rome, NY....  Of course I would find this on our last night here.

The internet tells me that track construction has started in Cleveland.  Here's a look (not my pics obviously) at the subfloor they throw down on top of the main ballroom carpet at the Holiday Inn in Independence (Cleveland suburb) Ohio.
http://www.rc50.com/modules.php?name=coppermine&file=thumbnails&album=16

And yes, the driver's stand is really only about a foot tall.

It's now snowing in Rome and it's supposed to snow everywhere from Rome to Cleveland tomorrow which could make the drive interesting.

Here's some last pics of us and our rides as we say goodbye to CRC.
http://www.irocc.ca/stories/Cleveland2005/Nov22/index.html


Blake

[haddow]

New poll is up...

if you guess correctly you win a dream house and car as well as a mexican cruise vacation and $25 cash spending money.

http://www.irocc.ca/modules.php?name=Surveys&pollID=37

[kukkiyukkuk]

Came by these 3 photos of the cleveland track (looks very technical
http://www.indoorchamps.com/photo/thumbnails.php?album=1&page=1

[Blake]

Hey guys,


Just checking in to let you know that we're alive and well in Cleveland.  Will post some pics and stuff later tonight.  We'll be racing until about 4AM tomorrow morning....

Actual qualifying begins tomorrow morning at 7AM so there isn't a lot of downtime for the track here.


Blake

[Grinder]

We're still rooting for you here...  oh and your Philly Cheese Steak was getting cold so I got Moxies to keep it warm in the oven till you get back...

[Blake]

Thanks Kurk,


Did you get the side of peppercorn sauce?  Mmmm, just thinking about that makes me so hungry right now.  It's 4PM here and I haven't had a single bite of food yet today.  Hopefully we're gonna hit up "Champs" in a few mins here (just waiting for Frank to finish his last race of the round).  Champs is this awesome sports pub/restaurant place where they don't fool around with burger size.  They're huge and very tasty.

Here's some pics/descriptions for the last couple of days (our travel day, and our practice day):
http://www.irocc.ca/stories/Cleveland2005/Nov2324/index.html

Today is the first day of qualifying.  We've put in one round so far and there will be another round starting in about an hour.  It takes about nine hours to run through one round of qualifying.  51 races in total.

19T is fricken scary.  The speed these things reach is awesome but it's so hard to control them.


Will check in again later.


Blake

[DekelzMan]

Hey Blake and Company,

Couple of questions: Just looking at your pit space and the Hi-IQ's, how many other Smithsonian level chargers do you see in the pits ? ( j/k, I woulda got one if there was one available at the time..)
How are the Spektrum units working out ?
Sure wish we could tap into that closed-circuit tv system, would be great to watch you guys. Have a great time and continued good racing:)

Mick

[jarrodH]

that track loks frekin huge, from the pics. i so want to make it down one year.

[Blake]

Hey Mick,


Although the Champs has been around for 26 years, it seems most racers have graduated to newer model chargers over these years.  I haven't seen an IQ outside of our pit anywhere.  The CRC guys just laugh when they see them.  Frank is like "Where did you get that relic?  Can you still buy them?".  He understands that they're still just as good or better than any current charger, he's just surprised that we still stick with them with no industry support.  We explained that we have an in-house technician (Tom) to help us out.

The Spektrums are having some problems out here.  Frank lost a big race recently because his Spektrum randomly turned off in the middle of a race.  At CRC lots of Spektrums were randomly shutting off if you hit a wall hard, or if a corner marshal happened to hit your antenna while marshalling you.  Same at Cleveland: at least a couple of Spektrums have randomly shutoff for nor real reason.  It's weird cause at IROCC I don't think anyone has had any problems have they?

In another vein, one of the rooms in the hotel had a small fire today when a battery pack exploded.  Some burns occured to the carpet and some other surrounding items.  No one was injured luckily but it was a bit of a disaster for the unlucky guy who owned the battery.  The fire people sprayed fire retardant all over his pit area and room and made a pretty big mess of everything.  Plus he has to pay about $600USD in damages.  I just happened to meet the guy a couple of days earlier (he's from Windsor, Korgae knew him, and hooked us up) so he came over afterward and gave me the straight goods about what happened.  The race directors were making it out like the entire room was engulfed in flames and that the guy was getting the boot from the race.  Anyway, nothing quite as extreme as that.

I just returned upstairs after watching the Touring Modified A qualifier.  Ridiculous speed in those things....  The ballroom always fills up with spectators when the A Modified of Touring or 12th Scale hits the track.

The first round of qualifying left a lot to be desired for the three of us.  None of us turned in any particularly stellar times so we're hoping for better in this second round.  Our stomachs are full of "Champs" food so that should help a little.

Frank is in good spirits as he's currently sitting in 3rd in 19T, he's confident that he can do well (ie. win) in Masters, and he's doing the best he's done in Modified in the last 10 years.  We made him sit down for a Champs burger with us.  Of course he ordered it "rare" and it was practically raw.  Gross.

Well, I think that's it for now.  Gotta get my car preped for Stock.


Blake

[Blake]

Oh, and a big thanks to Dave Oxendale for lending us this laptop (and dyno).  It sure makes it easy to post updates to the website.  We have Jody's here as well but it has such a high screen resolution that you can barely read anything on it.

It's great for games though!

Thanks Dave!


Blake

[Tom]

Sure wish we could tap into that closed-circuit tv system, would be great to watch you guys.

Check out:

http://www.rc50.com/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=4&mode=thread&order=0&thold=0

[jarrodH]

too bad it only refreshes the picture every 10-15 sec.

[jarrodH]

did anyone take a video camera? could you recorda few of the a main races so the people that couldnt make it get an idea of thelevel of drivers there? and the speeds.