By Barney The Flagman

Jeffrey Decker didn’t so much return to Sunday Night Skip Barber as reassert the natural order. After a long layoff from Sunday Night Skippy, the multi-time champion showed up for SNSB at Laguna Seca, stuck it on pole, set the fastest lap, and led 31 of 33 tours. It was the kind of wire-taut drive that changes the temperature of a season, a reminder that when Decker’s in the field, the front row suddenly gets a lot smaller.

The race around WeatherTech Raceway was classic Laguna in open-wheel trim: long stretches of rhythm punctured by sand-trap justice. Compared with the mistake-strewn Imola round, the field was cleaner, but the place still bites. Several drivers skated wide over the marbles at the exit of Turn 6 and paid in off-tracks and lost momentum, and the Corkscrew—predictably—claimed several retirements, for example when Glenn Rossney looped it and chose the prudent option rather than rejoin into a stream of blue flags. The Discord debrief had the usual mix of rue and relief. One driver laughed about catching “a somewhat random meatball” after too many curb kisses and used the stop for a fast repair and fuel; another, Pete Mobroten, parked it early after technical glitch caused a violent wheel spike and a graphics freeze. “Undriveable” was his verdict, and his DNF was the sort of technical heartbreak that never shows up on a pace chart but always shows up in the gut.

Up front, Decker was the metronome, but the podium fight mattered for the championship story. Adam Miles executed like a points leader in second, and—crucially—Colby Mann absolutely did race Laguna, hustling for a hard, smart third. That matters because the top of the table is a knife fight: Miles still leads on 270, Mann sits three back on 267, and Bryan J. Kelly—who had an uncharacteristically rough Sunday and faded to sixteenth—holds third on 246. The form guide says Miles’ incident discipline has been the season’s defining baseline, Mann’s outright pace remains the sharpest weapon when the car underneath him is happy, and Kelly has been the conscience of the season: clean, position-aware, and relentlessly in the points… until Laguna reminded everyone that even metronomes can skip.

There were proper movers in the midfield, too. Nick Mazza carved from tenth to fourth with the kind of zero-fuss race-craft that turns into a trend if you let it; Chris Herrera’s march to seventh from twelfth was equal parts patience and tire management; Max Di Giacomo made up eleven spots; and Aaron La kept building the season he’s quietly putting together, banking another top-ten from deep on the grid. Meanwhile, Karl Dronke’s eighth belied real speed—his best laps would have looked perfectly at home on the podium if he’d had the track position.

What does Decker’s re-entry actually change? Qualifying, immediately. A front-row Decker forces Miles to be impeccable off the line, turns Mann’s first-stint calculus into a risk-management problem in traffic, and makes Kelly’s “no drama, high floor” approach a high-wire act in dirty air. It also injects psychology. Decker didn’t just win; he controlled the race and owned the outright pace. That’s the sort of weekend that lingers.

Next up is Mount Panorama, and the paddock mood can be summed up by a line dropped in the league’s Discord chatter this week: “Bathurst will be won or lost in The Dipper.” You can feel the collective muscle memory coming back as people trade notes. The veterans insist you don’t brake as much as you think over the top; it’s the throttle pick-up out of the Dipper that punishes hesitation. There’s real anxiety about weather parity between practice and race servers, and more than one driver admitted they’re still over-rotating the car when the compression spits them out toward Forrest’s Elbow. Expect razor-thin gaps in qualifying—front-row deltas inside two-tenths—and then real accordion effects over the mountain in the race. Miss your line at McPhillamy or Skyline by a foot and you’re either understeering into concrete or backing out and inviting a dive into the Esses. There’s just nowhere to hide at Bathurst, which is why it produces the best nervous energy of the season.

Call it, then. If Decker repeats the Laguna execution, he sets the pace and the mood. Miles remains the center of gravity for the championship—his risk discipline is worth as much as raw lap time on a track that punishes greed—and Mann, fresh off that third at Laguna, is the most likely to put the car somewhere only he can catch. Kelly’s P16 at Laguna feels like an outlier; if Bathurst goes green in long chunks, his race-craft could be exactly what the mountain rewards. Either way, the plot twist the season needed arrived at the perfect time: the old lion is back, and the mountain is next.