Calling it a "design" is giving us WAY more credit than we deserve.
It was the autocross VPs plus President Dustin, and I suppose I was "lead designer," if you will. I had some overall strategies in mind. The main one was, I didn't want it to feel like an autocross course that was dropped out of an airplane piece by piece. You know the type. Slalom, whitespace. Lane change, whitespace. C-box, whitespace. That's what I was trying to avoid. I'm not sure we managed it, but that was the idea.
The taxiway, I think, is the worst possible place to try and design an autocross course. I hate it. We went through probably five different revisions for Saturday's. On around revision three, it looked exactly like a slalom all the way down the runway. Because that's what it was. So, we made an effort to not make it look like a billion-cone slalom. This was a mistake, at least, I think it was in hindsight. Any experienced autocrosser could see that most of the taxiway was sort of a big slalom, or maybe a few of them daisy chained together. Making a slalom cone into a gate just for the purpose of making it not look like a slalom cone runs counter to my philosophy of "simple is better." Nationals courses have a lot of cones out that, strictly speaking, don't need to be there. Maybe that's what I was subconsciously trying to emulate.
One member from a visiting club (whose opinion I respect) really hated the exit of the sweeper at the far end, into those two simple gates, on Sunday. He said it was visually misleading. I didn't buy it - after all, it was a sweeper that fed into two 2-cone gates - but I can see the point. Those gates probably should have been made of more cones. As it was, it could have been easily interpreted as something you went in from the side of it, rather than head on. I wonder if that's how he was DNFing. Anyway, one person's "visually obvious" is another person's "visual train wreck."
It's very interesting to me how mixed the opinions ended up being. As we now see, a lot of people really liked them. Other folks really hated them. What I didn't hear a lot of was "it was okay." Chris Cline told me he liked it because he found it "fast and difficult," and that made me happy.
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I guess I have another thing to work on for next year!
To each their own, I suppose.
