This years rules changes reduced the pit stops from 30 to 20 and also reduced airplane substitution to one change of airframes.

There were six teams, pretty much the same as last year.
 
The 2007 champion Stefanovic team brought in a new pilot, Janek Zalewski.

Chris Brownhill replaced his mechanic, John McFadden, with John Easton, age 77, a veteran of 100-mile RAT races of the 1960's.  McFadden stepped up to the role of Race Director.

Going the opposite way, Team Urtubey, formerly of Argentina, now Canada, put 13-old Dylan in the pits with his father Gustavo at the handle.

The Lapointe, Birks, and Smith teams stayed with proven crew positions.


A very smooth race with no substitutions.  The LaPointe Super Fly developed a loose and leaky fuel tank that needed some work, but otherwise the teams posted some times.  Since this pit schedule was new so it was too early to say if these times were any good.  One problem was the small fuel tank on the Brownhill Buster.  He completed his 20 pit stops with a lot of laps to go.

Brownhill and Easton - 1 hour: 40 minutes: 33 seconds (59.7 MPH)
Urtbey and Urtbey - 1:46:28
LaPointe and Henderson - 1:50:04


For the first half of the race it was a lively duel between the pilots Vadim Poliak and Janek Zalewski.  Both planes were quite fast, with Steve's being the faster on many, but not all segments.  I used three pit stops to fine tune the needle.  The race schedule requires an average of 66 laps per tank, so I carry enough for 110 to average out.  It came in handly because I needed to reneedle at 10 and 31 laps.

The Birks/Bourel Buster provided slow, but not too slow, traffic to justify a lot of passing.

Steve's blue & silver racer went sour around the 600 laps point and he put in the silver/blue replacement.  Unfortunately, that model developed fuel problems also and got out of control on the lead lap number 1261, triggering a three-plane dustup.  It was a RED FLAG race stoppage at the 1:18:44 mark.

The BBB came out of the crash cleanly, but my Giant Kingpin, powered by last year's prize engine was totally destroyed.  We finished out the remaining 139 laps with my Gulfhawk, which is good solid plane, but not  as fast or quick-pitting as my starter.


1st - Smith & Poliak 1:27:41 (68.4 MPH) a new record for LA 25 100-mile racing.
2nd - Birks & Bourel 1:31:31 excellent pitting put the team ahead of faster airplanes.
3rd - Brownhill & Easton 1:40:33
4th - Urtbey & Urtbey 1:46:28
5th - LaPointe & Henderson 1:50:44
6th - Stefanovic & Zalewski (about) 1140 laps

I noticed that we had some rather rare youth participation and took a survey of ages. Everybody was willing to respond.  From whait's worth,,,

Pilots:  63,48,47,47,43, 43
Mechanics: 77, 73, 63, 56, 14, 13.  Conclusion ?? I guess you can't say you're too young or old for this.

Note: Previous records were set with 25 and 30 pit stops.  Each of the three records are in the order that the various number of stops would imply.