Away from Grid races for a while...

I was predicting the moment would come.

Similar to others, the race time and much more, the preparation runs over the time I have free for my family.

I had issues with old Saturday races, and it is not over on Friday races (during the USA day ligth it means 10pm Brasilia).

Racing one of the Brazilian leagues on Sunday 9pm (Brasilia time) makes perfect to avoid family discussion here...

Nothing is free - that league has 25 to 30 drivers, some are much faster. Being at best 6th, and having last week blown engine, it is still fun!

I dont have way to prepare myself for 2 leagues.

So I will be leaving Grid races for one season. If I can hold it- it will be for long time.

Memories from last 4 years are great. 

First of all, here I got excellent friends. And I will not forget them. 

I started at very begining of this league. At all we were 6. I raced at fire team if I am not wrong. I was so bad on lapping / passing and learned with you.

I got 5 consecutive times the 2nd place at DC. Great time racing by Antares. Doug - please do not do it again eheheh (he got very bad behavior to open at my time to lap him, and for at least 3 times he spin out and took me out).

Winning Ant at Interlagos for 0.08 seconds was unbeliviable! Racing side by side with AJ, Matt, Ant, Sammy, Tom_G, C, etc. 

Now it is time to go. 

I will keep my old habit to download race video and watch you guys racing. Have fun!

Celso. 

Real pity to lose you Celso hopefully only for a while

I'm very sad to hear that, Celso.  I hope this change helps you find the right balance of commitments for yourself and your family, and that your participation in the Grid Motorsports community doesn't drop to zero.  Please know that you're always welcome on the grid and on the site.

I'm not really surprised at this, however.  To be honest, what's been more surprising is the degree of international participation that we've had in the seasons leading up to this.  Without ever intending to, the league developed a predominately global feel to it, and it's been awesome.  But also very fragile.  As we've said numerous times, it's *really* difficult to find a single schedule every week that people from all over the world can meet in real time and find it uniformly convenient and compatible to the point of being enjoyable on a sustained basis.

Heck, even the new Friday time, which was hand-picked as the sweet spot for coverage of the NA zones (and member schedules) is non-ideal for both myself and AJ.

In a perfect world, we'd be large enough and have enough resources at our disposal to run 4 or 5 full-blown events every week, each one catering to a particular demographic and set of schedule advantages.

But it's not a perfect world.  And unfortunately meeting the needs of the statistical average means failing to meet the needs of the statistical edges.

It's been a pleasure to have you race with us.  Don't be a stranger.

You will be missed.  I'm sorry to see you go.

We'll still be here though.  We've had people come back from all sorts of "sabbaticals".  We even have a couple actively re-emerging now.  Tommy G has been sited on the server and Jeremy has updated his account.  So you can always come back home.