I was at the 2011 Runoffs, figured I'd offer a few notes.

- Congrats to your new champions, Scott Tucker in STO in a Porsche 996tt AWD, and Joel Weinberger in STU in an Audi A4 turbo AWD. Personally, I think the AWD aspect of it is purely coincidental, as both showed up with very well-built and well-driven machinery.

- Attendance was light but decent in STO. We had Scott Tucker in his "out the blue" 996tt entry, David Pintaric in a sexy-looking Viper ACRX, Joe Koenig in a "bad azz mofo" BMW M3, Jerry Onx in an "America f&&k yeah!" Corvette Z06, Gary Kachadurian in a BMW M3, and Marty Grand triple-dipping (T2, STU, STO) in his Evo IX. The top guys would have fit right in to the World Challenge GT class. Unfortunately, a first-lap incident sent Joe to the hospital with serious -- but fortunately not life-threatening -- injuries, and put Jerry on a flat bed, leaving Dave and Scott duking it out for the rest of the race. Congrats to Scott for a well-driven race, and our best wishes for a speedy recovery to Joe.

STO Final Results (PDF)

- STU was a good field of "true" STU cars. Actually, I was even personally surprised at the depth of real STU cars and the relative dearth of double-dippers like Spec Miatae. I was also surprised at the appearance of Marc Hoover in a Mazdaspeed-turbo-powered Miata, taking advantage of our turbo table rules to run the smallest turbo inlet restrictor we allow (32mm), thus the lightest weight we allow (2200#!) Marc pedaled damn hard, but just couldn't keep pace with Weinberger in that WCT Audi A4; Joel just ran away with the STU championship. Congrats to the champ!

Behind them there was a SUPER battle for third between Marty Grand in his Evo IX, "Irish" Mike Flynn in his E46 M3, and another surprise of the weekend Eric Heinrich in his gorgeous Gulf-liveried E30 M3. Those three guys went hammer-and-tong amongst themselves; Marty eventually fell out with power steering failure and Mike had an unfortunate spin in T5, leaving Eric with a killer drive in the M3 to top out the podium. Behind them were many other good STU-quality rides, such as an Acura RSX, a Mazdaspeed MP3, a Mazdaspeed 6, and a Lexus Is300. It was a great field!

STU Results (PDF)

The CRB "Town Hall" meeting during lunch on Wednesday was fairly calm. Nothing new came from it, other than assurances to competitors that we're doing our best to minimize significant rules changes going forward, and that we'd REALLY like to get support on making STL a National class (get all your friends to double-dip in STL!)

We tried to put data boxes on the top-4 of each class. For various reasons, we didn't get a full compliment of results. Actually, I'm pretty disappointed in the results. But I appreciate the cooperation from the competitors, and we'll keep plugging away to ensure reasonable comparative parity.

It was a great time, and distinct pleasure to meet everyone!

Greg