Mid-Ohio is one of the five circuits that aren’t raced in the rain for safety purposes, which I totally agree with. Everybody was keeping an eye on the weather radar and by early afternoon it seemed like there was a break in the thunder showers. The AMA and all the circuit officials got to work and did everything they could to get the track dry.
There were about 25 Mid-Ohio driving school vehicles circulating, trying to form a dry line. As well as that there was a jet dryer which was giving off some serious heat and doing a pretty good job. Once the circuit was coming more or less into shape and a decent dry line had formed, there was a guy driving a truck with a load of tyres towing along behind him, scrubbing on the tarmac with smoke pouring off them. This was to try and lay rubber on the track which I think was a good idea.
In all fairness, the AMA get quite a lot of abuse of which some is definitely warranted but they did do a great job of trying to get the track dry. The only problem was that it was around 6pm when Superbike practice was ready to go out and this meant that now daylight was becoming an issue. They got their 15 minutes practice in, which looked pretty good, no wet patches. Then they got their shortened race in. Again, the track seemed to be in good shape as the race pace was pretty decent.
Then it was our turn, they got us out fairly quickly for practice and I found the track fine. My best lap was a 1min 28.7secs, around 1 second off qualifying in a 15 minute session so things cant have been in too bad shape. Even though the cloud was low and it was dull, visibility was definitely not an issue. One hour later then for sure it would have been a problem but at the time of finishing practice, things were fine…. I had no visibility problems and I had a fully dark visor on!
