SOLODEX 3
Sunday 10th, June 2007

Pictures

FLIPPERS OR VICTORS!!!!
By Karen Pinheiro

When it rains it pours………,

Usually if a day starts off like this, I would advise that the best thing to do would be to forget the whole thing. The fact that the radiator of the car that I was supposed to be driving got a hole on the way up to dex, had to be a sign…….a bad one, and boy was it. The fact that the tent people were not at Arima when I arrived at 9am (an hour later than planned due to the mechanical problems of the car), was an indication that things were not going to be good. The fact that the tent people still had not arrived by 10am, 11am or 12pm, was not looking promising. One thing that did arrive as ordered by some drivers was THE RAIN. Rain, rain and more rain which arrived at the same time as the tent people who sat in the van and waited, and waited and waited, until it stopped. By this stage, our planned 11am start had sailed away, the water on the course was rising like flood waters in Caroni, and the drivers were arriving by the Lynx load….and they were still smiling despite all of this.

When IT did happen……..the thing that was being shown through all these signs throughout the day, the thing that should have caused us to say “NO, this event cannot happen…….” Should we have really been surprised? The crash of the computer, just before the last few of the Novices had finished their fourth run was the icing on the cake.  The apparent loss of irreplaceable data of the drives throughout the day, gone …… all gone. *sigh*

BUT all was not lost. The fact that so many prayers for rain had been said somehow made the Gods shine on Solodex this very day. Proof that there is a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow was shown to all, and by some remarkable twist of fate, there they were, in all their glory, the results that will go down in history to prove that this was one of the best Solodex events ever. The seasoned Solodex drivers along with the TME crew, the Subie crew, the TSOC crew and all the others in between waded on through to the end for one hell of an event.

With a record number of 33 entrants for a competition dex event, including  3 female drivers, Novice class and EP class made up the 2 largest groups, with 9 Subaru drivers and 5 Evo drivers between the 2 classes. The Subaru’s came in the top three in NE class led by Mark Chung in his 2.0 N/A SRX putting down an excellent time for a first timer of 81.5 which was a very competitive time in comparison to other classes as well. Visitor Edward Millington from Barbados with his borrowed STI showed how to do successful runs by consistently bringing down his time over each of his four runs, to finish in 2nd place with a time of 82.8 and bringing up 3rd place was Brian Singh also in his STI who came in with a time of 83 flat.

The usual suspects of Alan Rajkumar Maharaj, Sanjay Singh and Kurt Pyke of GS class showed that cars that were built pre the PBA series can still have fun. It was a battle between Victors and non Victors and in the end, Victors came out on top with Alan’s fourth run bringing him his best time and 1st place in GS with 88.5, and Sanjay taking 2nd place one second behind Alan with 89.5. Kurt came in 3rd with a time of 96.4.
2 time novice winner for Dex 1 and 2 Vishnu Charran, now found himself in HS class with some very experienced Solodex drivers with some very sticky tyres. Lancer driver Rudi Singh finished 3rd with a time of  85.7 almost 1 second behind 2nd place winner Scott Dopson in his Mazda 323 whose best time was 84.8. Mileage Mack San Fernando sponsored Karl Winchester came in 1st place with his fourth run best time of 84.3.

With .5 of a second separating 1st and 2nd place in ES class, both best times coming from the second runs of both drivers and  both cars being Suzuki’s,  the battle was on between two long time supporters of Solodex,  Pete Arrindell in his Swift and Wayne Hutchinson in his Baleno. In the end Pete’s 84.1 couldn’t catch Wayne’s best time of 83.6, no matter how hard he tried in his final two runs, putting Wayne at the top of this class. Second time competitor Rudranath Rampersad brought up the 3rd place with 88.6 and Shaun Mohammed in his very wet open top Locust couldn’t break through that 90 second barrier.

SS class saw one lonely competitor this time around who didn’t seem to care that his feet were wet or that he was by himself. Narend Sooknarine showed the crowd how to drift around a Solodex course eating only a few cones on the way with the result being a time of 89.6 plus a 2 second cone penalty giving him a finish time of 91.6. Is it all about winning? Surely if you ask this to Narend now, he would tell you “hell no” it’s all about how much rain it takes to make it completely wild!

With the moving of 2 of the usual ESP drivers into the EP class, ESP saw only 2 competitors this rounds – Amir Hosein in his yellow Suzuki Ignis and Vaughan Callendar in his Rover 216. With the threat of rain on the way, this was the first time (and probably only time) that Amir could be seen first on the start line most eager to put down a time before the rain poured down. His theory (or was it prayers) paid off as unusually for a Solodex event, his first time was his best time which he painstakingly held onto through all four of Vaughan’s runs. Vaughan clocked a fourth run best time of 83.9 whilst Amir’s best time was 82.4.

And that was the end of a very long and wet event…………..or was it?

What?  Wait?  Did somebody say something?  Sean, that’s you shouting “power, power, power, power”? Did somebody say power? This man said that he wasn’t bringing a knife to a gun fight, and he wasn’t wrong. Provoking many a seasoned Solodex driver in the days before dex, there were those who really didn’t know what to expect from the battle of the super powers, the EVO 6’s and 7’s against the Subaru STI’s. One thing that was certain was that it wasn’t going to be a female on top that was for sure! Newcomers to EP, Novice Ian Seepersad, experienced 2006 champion Ryan Ramsaran, novice Sean Shairsingh and myself, were up against the very experienced Ryan Pinheiro, Devi Nath and Barry Mykoo.  Did we REALLY think we had a chance?  Barry set a good first run time, a full second plus faster than Ryan Pinheiro, however that didn’t last too long when Ryan peeped him by nearly 2 seconds by run 2. By run three, only .1 of a second separated Ryan Pinheiro from Barry and Sean was having a ball in the wet getting the crowd on their feet with his exhibition of all wheel drifting. The rest of us were just trying to keep up! It was however, the 4th run that was the most exciting with Barry going all out to try and take Ryan’s 74.3 which was in the bag until ……he hit the cone in the finish box. His fantastic time of 73.88 would have given him the lead from Ryan except for the 2 second time penalty. Despite the fact that Ryan already had it in the bag, he still pushed the car a little more scraping .8 of a second off his 3rd run time to come up with a winning time of 73.57 to give him the fastest time of the day, with Barry in second place with 74.47 and Sean coming in with an amazing 74.53 to give him a very well deserved 3rd place. Unfortunately for Devi, whose turbo was giving trouble, today was just not his day. And well, for the rest of us, we will just keep on trying.

Thanks to our sponsors for this event, Red Bull, Castrol, JK Entertainment and Battery Energy drink. Looking forward to seeing you all again soon at Dex 4 – July 15th.