I've gotten a bit of email from friends and well wishers who tell me that they like the pages, and that they'll look me up when they get to Mid-Ohio, or that they wish they could be at the Runoffs, just like I am.
The thing is, I'm not at the Runoffs this year.
I was supposed to be. After last year's successful coverage, I had every expectation that I'd be doing the official SCCA web page this year and that Valvoline would want to repeat their support this year. Needless to say, things didn't work out that way. Evidently last year's coverage annoyed some people in Denver (I am given to understand that it was brought up as one of the reasons I wasn't to get the official club web page, although noone ever said anything directly to me or to Valvoline about it.) I still thought Valvoline would want to do the page again, but they never formally comitted and at the last minute I found out that they were just going to link to the official SCCA page -- which left me in the lurch, as I had chosen not to chase after a prospective alternate sponsor for the pages. A disappointment, to be sure, but life goes on. This lack of direct sponsorship is the reason why we're using the na-motorsports.com domain name and why the Adbot banners appear -- they don't pay very well, and aren't particularly relevant to motor racing, but some income is better than no income.
Of course, I wouldn't be there in any case -- since I didn't get the official SCCA Web Page, I didn't quit my old day job, and in a bit of serendipity, that old day job has turned into a potentially very exciting startup venture -- and we're having a very, very busy October, so skipping out to Mid Ohio to sleep in the back of my van for a week turned out to be impractical at best.
Fortunately, John Dillon is taking up the slack. John is a SoPac flagger of some note, and a fine writer and journalist, who has been doing the Runoffs thing for years; in Krusty's first year of Runoffs coverage, I just grabbed the results John posted and put them on a web page. John doesn't work in the tech shed, and so won't go into so much detail as I did in 1996 about events in there, but he covers more of the track and more of other goings on. Ideally, doing a Runoffs page like this takes the both of us for complete coverage.
As for next year, I have every expectation of returning to Mid Ohio for the 1998 Runoffs and doing the whole thing all over again, this time bringing along my wife and daughter (My daughter Madeleine is 10 months old as I write this, and has already demonstrated the ability to sleep at a race track despite the noise as well as an interest in watching the brightly colored objects fly by on the front straightaway.)
So here's to a good 1997 and a better 1998; I'd like to be there, but like most of you, I have a "real" job.
Runoffs News and Results / Richard Welty / Krusty Motorsports / rwelty@krusty-motorsports.com