Gateway SCCA Race Day
October 31, 2004

After days of rain and cloudy cold weather Halloween day dawned bright and cool. Kris and I headed over to Madison, IL, just East of the Arch to Gateway Speedway. Kris and I had been there earlier this year for a Kart event in June, and were interested in seeing the big cars run on the infield roadcorse/oval.

The group was invited by Don Ridenour to attend as his pit crew, and we quickly spread the word and made our arrangements. Don was a great host and we had a wonderful day watching the various events run.

Don's spider had spun a bearing in qualifying on Saturday and was on the trailer by the time we had arrived at the party, but we did get a chance to meet a number of his friends that had been racing FP and got to see a number of neat cars. It doesn't show up too well in the pictures, but Kris is wearing his Mirafiori Fiat shirt and his FLU hat trying to look like he belongs in the group.

Jude and Jennifer Rudder were there with their team of Formula cars. Jude won his class s in his event. They ran at least four classes together and the racing was exciting for us to watch and probably pretty exciting for Jude also as there was quite a speed difference in the different cars. As a coincidence, it turned out that Jude had constructed Don's Fiat race car when he was working for Vicks Autosports in Texas and recognized the car as soon as Don pulled into the pits. Jude is currently building cars here in the St. Louis area and up till recently was competing in a spider.