I ran tubeless (Schwalbe UST tyres on mavic tubeless rims) for the first time, and also got my first ever mountain biking flat... put a tube in the rear at the bottom of terminal velocity (along with 50 million other people) and didn't have any more issues. Last year I ran tubes and everyone else on my team had tubeless ... I was the only person who didn't flat. With tubeless maybe I was running them too low for the rocks...
I thought the organisation this year lacked somewhat. The change of briefing time, failure to mention in briefing the fact that we merged with the solo course at a couple of points and were required to give way (instead there was an excited vollie yelling "slow down, give way" at the bottom of the down hill track and I had no idea what was going on), failure to mention vehicle access and none of the vollies seemed to know when we would be able to get vehicles in after the event. It was pretty crap no being able to drive even remotely close to camp on Friday afternoon... When we turned up we asked at rego for course maps and info on transition - as the earlier maps had team transition wrong - and no one knew where we could get that info... turns out it was in the bag but no one could tell us that - just gave us Mullets phone number but I'm sure he had more important things to do than help us decide where to put up our tent so we didn't ring him
. Sign posting on the track lacked a bit, a few more bits of bunting and some reflective stuff would help. Especially as some larger teams you get riders doing their first lap at night and reflective warning about corners coming down through camp at high speed would have been good.
But on the upside I thought the track was pretty awesome during the day (although punishing at night - definitely much harder than last year), definitely techy and hard for a 24 hour but I really enjoyed it even if I did leave skin behind. Most volunteers were awesome (a few were a bit worked up and militant - esp the ones slowing ppl down on the crit track because of the injured rider and ambulance... chill guys!), overall the event was pretty awesome, thumbs up for the designated camping by team size - pairs and threes need to be closer to transition and it worked well.
Overall I thought the track was probably a bit hard for night riding, even if you could ride it, chances were the person in front if you would stop and so you'd have to stop too. Lots of large rocks seemed to come loose and end up in the middle of the track too.