There are some great comments here, but the common thread is "how to cut a better light". In the old days there was a fantastic magazine called Bracket Racing USA (BRUSA). It dealt solely with bracket racing, and offered tons of excellent advice for beginners, which I was at the time. Important factors like staging exactly the same every time, running the exact same air pressure every run, making sure to hit your shift points on a run, and "leaving with the same RPM" all stuck with me. This magazine taught me to keep a log book for all my runs. It also taught me that purchasing a practice tree is cheaper than taking your car to the track to tune your launch practices. I used to attempt make 100 wins on the practice tree every night. I would track my wins vs. losses. I found that as I got better on the tree, my only losses were a very rare slow light, and mostly they were due to going red. Funny thing...in the beginning I tried to cut a .500 light (that's .000 to you young guns). That caused me to go red a lot. It showed in my practice results as well as my actual racing. The practice tree that I used came pre-set to give a win at .530 (.030 today). I found that if I tried to cut a .015 light, I would still go green if I was a bit early, and if I was a bit late, I was still better than .030. .030 lights win lots of rounds. The best advice I could give anyone on here...get a practice tree. I'll be lurking to see what else pops up here.