2009 ROAR Fuel Nationals - Wednesday & Thursday

DAY ONE - Wednesday July 15, 2009
The team arrived at the 2009 Roar Fuel Nationals at Leisure Hours Raceway in Joliet, IL on Tuesday afternoon. We are here in full force with 23 team members attending. When we arrived the track looked really good and smooth. We spent most of the afternoon setting up the Losi pit area.

We woke up Wednesday morning to discover that it had rained for most of the night. When we got to the track we found that it had rained more than we thought, we could hardly get our car into the dirt lot to park. They ended up pushing practice back until noon which was not bad. The day ended up being a good day for the team. They ran two rounds of practice in heats, which I thought was the right thing to do since they started late and there were a good amount of people there.

The team mainly just focused on getting the track down. There are a couple of spots on the track that are a bit technical with some jumps in corners, and a very large jump in the center on the track. By the end of the day they all had it down pretty well. The track at the end of the day was very hard packed and grooving-up nicely. It looked as if it would hold up nice all week.


DAY TWO - Thursday July 16, 2009
We had no rain Wednesday night which was nice. Thursday's practice was run by ROAR, which means they set up new heat sheets. We are not sure if these are going to be the qualifying heats for Friday and Saturday. They ran two hours of open practice in the morning, one hour for truggy and one hour for buggy. The track was still looking good and grooving up more and more.

So they all tried different tires throughout the day, with Billy and Casey liking the Losi red Eclipse on buggy and Bowfighters on the truggy. Mike is liking the Bow Tie all the way around his buggy and Bowfighters on the truggy. Adam is using the Caliber on both his buggy and truggy. Most of the other team members are running the Losi Eclipse's in Red.

Mike and Adam seemed to be the to fastest on the track today with 32 sec lap times. Billy and Phillip are right there with those times but not as consistent throughout the day. This could have been because Billy and Phillip tried a lot of tires throughout the day. Everyone seemed to be happy with the cars today and is looking forward to qualifying tomorrow.

The track started to break-up at the end of the day, and looked to be getting a little slower in the last couple of heats today. As we started packing up our stuff to head back to the hotel we had a big storm come through that put a lot of water down on the track. This will change a lot for Friday's qualifying. We will have to see what happens tomorrow.