Scouting report: Today Drew and I drove up to see the site and conjure up a workable course from all of the possibilities. After hours of deliberation, slaving over possible course maps and driving segments of the course I believe that we have a winner. We're working on getting a trial run video uploaded so you can see the course. All I can say about the course is that if we use our traditional 2 minute bogy time a DNF could become FTD. (In other words this will be a longer than 2 minute course for most of us.)
We are hoping to attract some new blood to this event, but we may impose a "novices MUST have an experienced rider along" rule in an effort to prevent any serious over-driving. (Oh, and Sebastian is now officially a novice
) This rally-school course was set up in part to train DOD drivers in off road driving (sort of a high speed chase off road, if you will), so parts of this course are pretty quick. We basically seamed parts of 3 courses together to get to a reasonable length a course. We may have a couple of places where we add a cone or two to promote safety, other wise we envision 4 cones (two at start and two at finish), other than that it's pretty much just follow the mowed trail. With almost no cones we plan to use course workers primarily as red flag stations. You shouldn't have to run for cones, but we need to be able to stop other cars should someone spin or stop on course.
If you have any plans in September that could possibly conflict with this event, now is the time to start changing those plans - this is going to be one heck of an event.
Watch for more details as we flesh out the organizing details.
If you watch the video there are a couple of things to ignore. 1) ignore the tires on the course; those will be removed (especially from the outside of any turns), 2) the grass today was about 3' tall and we wanted to leave it that way, but the track maintenance staff was concerned that if anyone left the course the dry grass could contact a hot exhaust with unfavorable results. Since our event is in September the grass should have a chance to grow back if they mow it this month, but it would be shorter and greener than last year's broom straw. 3) The video just shows our first run through to check the base line time (a few runs were made with our VIR host on board that were significantly faster - but none under 2 minutes). Luckily my GoPro battery died before Drew let me take a test run; that way no one gets to see me totally blow the braking for the hairpin turn and drive into the deep grass. I did get a brief run through in the VIR pickup truck before we did any cut through to connect the courses. If I had tried I could have had a 3+ mile run through those trails. If we have the opportunity to run here again, there are plenty of other track configurations that we would love to try.
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