Since I’m in Germany I went to look at an AX event last Sunday. The event was held in an industrial park. They used the street for the course layout. The event is run by class and group, with an assign run time, you show up before your assign time, go to tech inspection, than do your runs. When the group is finish they will post the time and sometime later (protest period I suppose) they will do the trophy presentation for the group. During that time another group is running. When your group is finish you can leave if you wish, there is no pylone duty per say. They had a group of people doing it and they seem to be from the organizing club but I don’t really know more than that. What I’m sure is that the competitor didn’t have to do it. The course layout allowed for only 1 car at a time. They were doing the loop twice per run, see course map picture below and video. The picture of the offset slalom with the pointer cone in the opposite direction of what we used is the part of the course we don’t see in the video. They do 3 runs, the 1st one is a practice run the 2nd and 3rd are time run but they are added together for the final time. Also, pylone hit is a 3sec. penalty each. If you miss a gate it’s 15sec. So cone penalty is really important since they are adding both time run. The course was open to walk for about 10min between some group.
As for cars there was a good variety, not much stock car, they all mostly had some suspension work and they mostly all run on racing slick. From what I understand they used a power to weight ratio formula, in one class they had a BMW Z4M, a Porsche GT3 a VW Polo R and a Renault Clio. The GT3 and the Polo R where not running on racing slick the other 2 were. The Z4M won the class and the group and held fastest time until the other type of classification started to run. This other type of classification is by engine size, those cars will be running in Prepared class in SCCA and they were the fastest. The Opel Kadett seems to be the car to have.
People were friendly some didn’t speak much English even less French. There was 2, 500 Abarth, one with 3 driver, the father, the daughter and the son. There was also a Fiat 128 in the “prepared class”. I spoke mainly with them and with the Z4M owner, all mainly middle age persons. There were a few family car like the Abarth and few cars were shared between driver. Their idea of AX in the US is “ Airport” I told them that was not always the case and that used parking lot quite often. The Abarth in the video had 210hp and running on Hoosier slick.




Link to video
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=82XS00_uyswhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w6okv0ml4Lk