| First, the weather was stupid hot. We've been blessed with mild temperatures up until the event weekend, and then the Texas heat decided to put on a show for our visitors. They claim 9% of people in attendance were from NZ/Australia. The 3-day attendance was about 68,000 people. To put that in perspective, MotoGP was 120,000, Formula 1, 250,000, and Grand-Am, 28,000 (I find this hard to believe). I thought the ticket pricing probably kept some local people away from a 3-day pass. I think they were about $90 pp and they only opened up 1-day passes through groupon/living social for about $40pp a week before the event. The V8 supercars had this reputation of being pretty wild with a lot of bumping, rubbing, and aggressive driving. I'd have to disagree a little. There were a couple of incidents, but they penalize the drivers pretty heavily for making illegal moves and from what I could tell: most drive smart. That's great for the cars, drivers, and owners...not as fun for spectators. The only other problem is that the RedBull team basically dominated 3 out of 4 of the races, and even in the one they didn't win 1st, I think they still placed 2nd and 3rd. The Nissan team did alright. What I actually enjoyed more was the Pirelli GT/GTS races. These are your everyday cars modified. The GTS class is fairly stock, minus the suspension and a few other things. The announcers plugged the Motul/SPL Parts 370z. There was a GT-R I think in the GT class that was not very good...kept having mechanical problems. The Audi R8s and Cadillac CTS-V dominated the GT class (Audi > Cadillac this weekend). Also, we saw way more action with the GT/GTS cars than we did with the V8s.
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