Is this thing on?
The hangover's gone, but I still have to rant about the treatment of PiKA B. There might be situations where a buggy/driver meets all the paper qualifications, but is so demonstrably unstable that in Sweepstakes' general discretion should be not allowed to race, or subject to restrictions. E.g., crashes 50% of the time, but qualifies on paper because they tried twice as many times. In this case, she performed as well on truck Sunday as PiKA B usually does (when it was 40F warmer), so where's any evidence of unsafety?
So we end up with PiKA B restricted in freeroll speed, but with a prelim seeding is based on years when they had no such restriction. So they end up in close quarters in the chute with Spirit B, which neither driver has experience with. Sure sounds "safer" than letting both drivers do their own thing, like they'd practiced.
Having set an artificially slow prelim time, they're allowed to go full speed in the final. If they were allowed full speed in prelims, they would've matched up with PiKA A or SDC A, but instead are in a unnecessarily tight race with CIA A. Sure, Fringe B also outperformed their seeding by doing a pusher swap, but there's plenty of precedent for that.
While everything worked out, it's the failure to consider the totally predictable follow-on effects which bugs me more than the original decision. Sweepstakes had the ability to deal with them if they'd looked one step ahead, but didn't.