Some Encouragement

At the end of last year I became lax about analyzing my results. I was somewhat down on myself for my results, failing to clinch the championship 4 races straight and not looking forward to seeing it in black and white. In prep for the coming season I finally went back and forced myself to enter the data. Then I took a brief look at the graph....

Events 7 8 and 9 are the final 3 data points. Events 5 and 6 omitted because Match tours and NHMS events are not comparable to regular events at Ft. Devens.

Event 7 was just as bad as I thought. It sucked. I got DSQ after 6 for sound, drove like crap and ran around looking for tail pipe muffling materials rather than thinking about the course... not helpful. My final time was worse than any time since early 2011. That day I just plain sucked.

Then I looked at Event 8. Wow.  MY FASTEST TIME INCLUDED A CONE (a 2 second penalty) on event 8, and it was, my 5th best pax result ever (69th percentile of 140 competitors). My result on the final event was my second best ever... Looking at the results in event 8 of the 29 people who were class champions (ignoring junior Karts) in 2013, I out paxed 8 of them carrying a cone. So it seems that at least on that day, I was a much faster driver than ~1/3 of the NER class champions for 2013.

This tells me 2 things... One, SSM was quite competitive on that day, and two, I really did drive like a screaming banshee on that final run. That run was only dirty by a single cone, and the clean line was very likely faster. If I can be that fast and stay clean, I'll have taken it to a whole new level... Very encouraging.

Also, the final event is my 2nd best time ever. A few folks may have been slower than usual trying to compete in the Moss (where the 2nd half is scored by consistency not outright speed). But most of those folks would normally either be ahead or behind me. Nobody in the moss came in slightly slower than me, so the result is still pretty believable and that's encouraging too.