This past weekend was the Ponca City qualifier out at Sand Mountain. I could go on about how the top racers dominated the day, but I think it more important to write about the track. The night before the event Alabama got some rain. It held off all day Saturday, but couldn’t quite make it through the night and sometime around 3:30 am it started to dump. Rain in the South is pretty thick. It doesn’t just come down for a few minuets like it does back home in San Diego. It comes down for at least an hour at a time. So, you get the piucture and if you have ever been to Sand Mtn you know it’s a challenging track and doesn’t need any help being more technical. For the most part Sand Mtn is an outdoor style Mx track. The dirt proceeds it’s name and is a good mxture of sand and loam. The lay out is a bit technical, but safe. Sand Mtn probably has one of the safest starts your going to see in Mx. Too many tracks have a short start a right hand turn and then some crazy double. Not the case at Sand Mtn. The start allows plenty of time to thin the field before it get technical. The track has some rythem section and is jumpy for an outdoor style track. What makes Sand Mtn a safe place to race is their attention to detail with their track preporation. With a track soaked to the bone and some technical sections thrown in you would think that this race would have been an accident waiting to happen, but this was not the case. The track preporation was so well thought out that the races they we’re able to run went off as planned. Sand Mtn MX put the racer’s saftey first. They even pushed the schedule back so they could take an extra hour and half to drain the track. Sand Mtn is a challenging track that makes for some great racing. The track crew did a great job of making the track safe in what normaly would be unsafe conditions. Even more impressive is that the rain got pretty bad after the first moto and they cancled the races. I know that was probably not the ending you were looking for, but in a sport that needs more heads up thinking and a saftey first attitude this ended up being a good day. All went home in one piece and will be out again next weekend.