Skipping the long form race report for this weekend, Facebook got the TLDR instead:

Had a ball spending three days in the middle of nowhere with my sumo friends at Boxshop. I got to be one of the first on the redone and much larger dirt section and finally got my mojo back on pavement. I think this is the hardest I've pushed Mistake on pavement actually and know where I'm still loosing lots of time there. Dirt, well... I rolled everything for the most part and clearly need to spend some time on that portion of the sport to progress.

Slightly more long form:

As noted pavement felt good. I did get beat by a kid, Trafton, who is on what is likely the ideal setup for Boxshop, a CRF150RB (Good power to weight without being overkill) and he's getting faster and faster every event. Had some of the other fast pavement people shown up, like say Ben Gloddy I think it'd have been a very interesting fight. Meanwhile, I'm fighting some of my bike's nature, when the revs drop it gets SOFT so I'm sluggish out of the hairpin and when I'm trying to 'feather' it around the sweeper it's getting a little 'bucky' which keeps me from going harder. I missed my upshift a couple times out of Opie's and ended up slamming it in the sweeper while cranked over with no drama which proves there is way more grip available than I'm expecting. On the last race I did start cracking the throttle more in that section, getting it past the transition and 'onto the pipe' a bit and the bike loved it so I know I can go faster. I'm also likely making that sweeper too much of a turn and instead need to straighten it a bit, and more 'point and shoot' into the chicane section?

The dirt intimidated the hell out of me. There is nothing 'big' about it other than the killer last berm'd 180, but the new layout requires you to be much more technically precise. The old layout had some jumps, with a decent amount of space in between. If you cased something, over jumped, etc, you had time to recover before reaching the next item. Now, no such luxury. Jumps lead into more jumps or deposit you right at a berm, etc. Aaron advised just standing up and rolling things at first, which worked for me. Standing up in the dirt made it so I wasn't at least freaking out. I did try letting the bike off the ground a few times, at one point panicing into a berm 'properly' after coming in hotter than planned. As noted above, what I need to do is spend a lot more time in the dirt, ideally with some guidance on technique so it's not wasted time. I have no real frame of reference for what I'm doing in the dirt so... it's easy to get flustered or in over my head. If I'm going to go anywhere in Sumo I have to fix that.