Hello race fans! I know you're out there, judging from the number of cone carvers that descended on Eastland Mall's parking lot on April 30th. We had an impressive 105 drivers on what turned out to be a great day for autocrossing, albeit a little warm for the end of April. Thanks to a smooth running timing and scoring system we were able to get in five runs for everyone plus a good number of fun runs. On the down side, we had a number of people who could not make it to registration on time. This, unfortunately, has a snowball effect that slows down our whole event. Consequently, we will be charging a $10.00 late fee from now on. In case you have not heard, registration is from 8:00 to 9:30.

Now on to the results: John Johnson (no I didn't make that up) took a decisive win in SS after a long hiatus from solo 2 with a 4 second margin over Scott Morris's corvette. AS was a little closer with Chris Baker bringing his Porsche 911 home with the win by a margin of 1.5 seconds over Brad Graham. Adi Chung took BS in a group of three Miatas. Tom Morgan pulled off a 41.006, taking the CS win and FTS. DS went to Spencer Stubbs and Craig Fogleman (surprise, surprise) took the ES win. Les Davis won the two talons GS class and Scott Sawyer reigned victorious in HS. In street prepared, Buck Marchant smoked the ASP class with a 40.016 - 4.5 seconds over 2nd place. With only 15 hundredths of a second covering the top three finishers in CSP, Derek Ketchie narrowly clawed his way to the top in his Porsche 914. Wes Wines piloted a BMW 323 to victory in DSP, while Chris Peterson edged out Geoff Zimmer in the battle of the butterscotch bunny, leaving yours truly a little under a second behind in third. With his usual mount home sick in the stables, Todd Hopkins was unable to hold off David Jackson's roaring Camaro. "I didn't plan on beating Todd," Jackson said later, "But lets face it, he had it coming." You didn't hear that from me, though. Jinx Jordan won DP with a blistering 39.924 in his Honda Civic, Frank Overbey took EP in his Nissan 240 SX and Alan Giles won FP in his pretty red Z. So, you think it costs a lot to go fast around a solo 2 course? Think again! FTD went to Ryan Jackson in a Jr. cart with an awesome time of 39.515. But, wait, there's more........ Mitch Stone, also driving a cart, had the second fastest time of the day at 39.757. Let's see, FOR SALE:85 GTI... Ginette Jordon was tops in the ladies class which saw five fast females fighting for fame and fortune (F words- fantastic fun for the whole family!), with Karla with a "K" Oosterhouse just under 7/10th of a second behind in her Neon taking second. With the novice class making up over a quarter of the field, you can bet that there were plenty of hungry hot-doggers awaiting the PAX results at the end of the day. And "The Ballpark Franks" rookie of the day award goes to--- Josh Honeycutt in the GS Acura Integra, followed by Nate Woodward and John Hollis.

Knock, knock, knock. "Honey, it's the literature police again. Something about writing with an expired poetic license." Uh oh, better go. Thanks to everyone for coming out and especially to all the people who helped make this event possible.

David Mohler