Still no rain

And we wait and wait, but still no rain today. It rained hard last night but the track was covered, and Live Nation spent the morning pumping water off of the tarps. During a meeting this morning there was a hope of a weather window between 3 pm and 2 am with no rain, so they're going to pull the tarps up at 3:30, have a track walk and then some practice. If that weather window doesn't close, we'll have another notch on the "races that should have been mudders that weren't." Perhaps I'm jinxing Southern California now, and if so, hey, you had no idea this blog was powerful enough to change the weather, did you?

You know what I like about this year's racing? We all know James Stewart and Chad Reed should be the fastest guys, but I'm looking forward to the bug mash up of guys behind that. I'd maybe, maybe put Langston as a third favorite, but can you really guess who will be better this year between him, Ferry, Tedesco, the forgotten talent Davi Millsaps, Andrew Short, Nick Wey, Vuillemin...then you technically have two rookies this year in Josh Hill and Mike Alessi. Where will all these guys all fit in? We may need to remove all fixation on focusing on who wins only, and instead look a little further back. Of course, this summer we learned that guys battle a lot harder when they're racing for first instead of third....

And then we have Lites, starring Ryan Dungey, Jason Lawrence, Broc Hepler, Brett Metcalfe, Jake Weimer, Austin Stroupe.... this title is up for the taking now that Villo2 is out, which should make it really fun to watch. Careers can change depending on how tonight shapes up--for real a bad race in a short series can cost someone like say, Hepler, his best every chance at landing a professional title.

But bad races should be easy to avoid tonight, because the tarp is coming up and it's still not raining!

Tarps coming off