[Chris Vivo]

It has been my experience that the teams at the LA regional pick alliance partners based on performance. We were picked for direct eliminations our rookie year as was at least one other rookie team. I know that when we do our scouting, we do not worry about whether a team is a rookie or not, all we worry about is on field performance and what we find out when we visit them in the pits. This year, it just turned out that non-rookie teams got selected over rookie teams. We are a veteran team, but we did not get all of the bugs worked out until the end of the day on Friday, so I knew we had little chance of being selected, even though we did well Saturday morning.