I hear ya! There's one compromise I will always make and that is to take grass to pavement transitions very conservatively. I'm allergic to crashing on pavement - I tend to break out in a rash (Boom! Boom!). btw, some promoters do make an effort to sweep rough gravel on sketchy pavement or make similar efforts to lessen chances of bad crashes.

That course was a huge improvement over last year. Although they went a bit hogwild on the repeated off-camber hairpins, there were a bunch of open power sections where one could pass, I loved going up the hill twice.

The one section that was ridiculous was the 50 yard dash at the start into the quadruple hairpins. Didn't make a difference if you could sprint or not. It was all about which row you lined up. The leaders were already long gone by the time you exited and the race for the top 10 was effectively over. Several races this year have had similar starts but this was extreme. Apart from being explicitly advised against in USAC rules, there was simply no need for it, there are plenty of natural obstacles in the course to string things out. Simply bad design.

Thre was also some confusion over the pit area. Originally, there was a double pit near the bridge. At some stage of the morning it was decided to move it to the start/finish and make it single entry. Although it didn't affect me, a lot of the flats happened on the concrete path exiting the sandpits, requiring riders to run more than half a lap to get a wheel change. Leaving the pit near the bridge would have worked out much better for them.