lol, that's a good one richard, always get a laugh out of your humor.
re the resistor
don't know why exactly it failed. best guess is the abuse it took from the way it was previously hooked up and just finally failed for some reason. the way the system is set up the lights are alway off so the resistor is working harder than if the lights were always on? don't know if this makes sense since i'm not electrically literate. at a 1/4 watt it wouldn't take much, but if it wasn't previously damaged then whatever killed it would have to go through the circuit board in the controller and it is working fine. scott said that he set the controller board up so it would be difficult to damage it then he laughed and said it had been done a few times btw.lol
re the road course, i'm going to have to fix that one too. i can't get a run at my favorite offramp because of traffic. was going to mid america at omaha yesterday but wasn't quite there, maybe next week, probably have to take the goins car, you know, learn how to walk first thing. plus there's plenty of runoff!
take care