I'm writing this on the flight back to Toronto from Las Vegas; as the red-eye it's supposed to be an opportunity to catch a few winks before heading back to the ad agency tomorrow. But I can't sleep. Maybe it's the guy next to me snoring, or maybe I'm just excited about all the great stuff I saw at the show.

For me, the highlight of SEMA this year was seeing our brand-new four-door Civic Si on display in the Honda America booth. It showcases our new 2009-spec of the car in its striking bright-orange livery and was prominently parked next to Danica Patrick's IRL car. Bill Fenton's black #29 Civic was also on display in the booth, which shows just how important the KONI Challenge is to Honda's efforts in marketing the new Civic Si.



A couple of other KONI cars were seen at SEMA: RSR's Mini was the highlight of the KONI booth, which had one of team owner Randy Smalley's pinball machines available to play with. You may have seen these machines at KONI events, as they've become a fixture in the RSR paddock. Unfortunately, I'm more of a video game guy and I'm pretty sure I didn't impress anyone during my turn behind the paddles.

Over at the Subaru booth, the ICY/Phoenix Legacy was featured, for the second year in a row. It was next to the Crawford Time Attack WRX, and the tricked-out rally car of Travis Pastrana.

I heard of some reports in the media that attendance at SEMA was down a little from last year, but it certainly didn't seem that way to me. Our new Civic always had a steady stream of interested attendees around it, and the aisles were absolutely packed.

We did our part by bringing a few of our crew from this year. Mike and Rob were our student volunteers this season, and as a thank-you to them for their hard work, we flew them down for the show. Like all of our crew, these guys did a fantastic job all year and it was fun to share the SEMA experience with them.

It's a busy schedule for us over the next few months, leading up to the Daytona test days in early January. The SEMA 4-door will return to Toronto next week and then undergo some testing before the snow falls. Our second 4-door donor car arrived earlier this week and is already stripped, ready for the cage to be installed.



We're working on finalizing our driver line-up, with the hopes of having three very solid combinations, each capable of taking race wins and, indeed, the championship. We've had good success over the past two seasons, taking second both times, and you can imagine we're doing our best to make sure we do everything we can to be at the front of the pack again next year.

The new Civic Si promises to be a great replacement to our TSX's, and we can't wait for Daytona!

Labels: gablog