Ralph Burch (XRAY USA/RCAmerica) & XRAY T2'008 won the 28th annual US Cleveland Indoor Championship:
1) Ralph Burch XRAY T2'008
2) Mike Blackstock 3) Paul Lemieux XRAY T2'008
4) Mike Dumas
5) Josh Cyrul
6) Juho Levenen
7) Jeff Dayger
8) Keven Hebert 9) Jilles Groskamp XRAY T2'008
10) Bobby Flack XRAY T2'008
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Race report by Paul Lemieux
The team at the indoor championships consisted of Ralph Burch, Barry Baker, Brian âśDirtinatorâť Kinwald, Bobby Flack, Paul Lemieux, Drew Ellis, and Jim Herman. Much of the team came to Cleveland early to practice at a nearby track (The Gate) for some running on a similar surface.
Practice
Right away the team showed that we would be hard to beat, with most of the team getting a few good first practice runs. Jim Herman was looking good in 19T, and in Mod it was Paul Lemieux, Barry Baker, and Ralph Burch looking good early on, with non-XRAY driver Mike Blackstock also looking to be on pace.
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Qualifying
At this point the team was still going in all directions trying to find the best setup. In 19T, Jim Herman was coming out of the gate and setting a blistering first round TQ. In Mod it was Mike Blackstock setting the early TQ. After 2 rounds the team was getting things sorted out and Ralph Burch seemed to hit on a good setup but had bad luck in the early qualifiers. Most of the team started to move over to his set up. When qualifying was over it looked like this: Ralph Burch laid down an awesome last qualifier to convincingly set TQ in Mod over Mike Blackstock (2nd) and Paul Lemieux (3rd). Bobby Flack snuck into the Main in the last round also. Brian Kinwald and Barry Baker both had bad luck in qualifying, just missing the main. In 19T, Jimmy Herman held on to TQ for most of qualifying but in the end Mike Blackstock grabbed TQ away from him. Some crashes and bad luck kept Paul out of the main in 19T.
Mains
In the 19T main, Mike Blackstock lead wire-to-wire for the win. He was challenged by Josh Cyrul for a short time, but Josh got in trouble trying to make a pass.
Now the stage was set for Mod!
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None other than Ralph Burch got the holeshot, and he took off and had over a full 1sec lead after the first lap. Paul also had a good start and was working his way into number 2 spot throughout the race; he worked his way into striking distance a couple of times with Josh Cyrul a short distance behind in 3rd. Then with about 30 seconds to go Paul traction rolled coming out of the sweeper which allowed Josh to jump into the number 2 spot... but the race was already Ralph's and he cruised to victory. So the final order was Ralph followed by Josh and Paul.
Overall, the T2â™008 performed great and the race was obviously a huge success for XRAY with a win in the prestigious Modified class.
