Impressions (prepare for rant):
Ok so if you were following the thread in Club Discussion that Graham started, Jim Pastorious brought up THSCC's communication and I agreed and mentioned how Jon Felton at NASA does a great job about communicating: whether it be to pass entrants about up coming events, or to currently registered people with updates, schedules, rule changes, FYIs etc.
So that's about where the positive things end unfortunately. I'm trying to keep this as objective as possibly and not bring the bitter cold into affecting my comments
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1. They do NOT have their sh** together when it comes to timing equipment...it looks like their cables and equipment is from the stone age and it took 6 runs (per car) of the first heat before they even got it working.....hey people, the event didn't start till noon and they were setting the course up at 8 am...they could have tested it.
2. The course was not 'walkable' until 10:15 am. I got there at 8:30 with intention of getting 4-5 walks given it was slated to be a BIG course
3. Radio communication would NOT copy calls and they wanted us to say which station you are at when calling in, which added (IMO) unnecessary radio traffic....walk up participants were required to have number between 900-999...most of these participants were novices and in NASA they run in numerical order according to car number and radio communication was absurd and no copys didn't help
4. Course was really good/fun except for the very very end. Given the course setup, they wanted to have a slow finish because it aimed towards the grid at the end. This is COMPLETELY reasonable. But the way they had it was like half a Cbox that was so tight that you negotiated it at like 5 mph and most people chugged across the finish line. I mean, the Minis had trouble with it. It wasn't about driving skillfully and driving the right line either, it was purely forcing you to go from 55+ to 5-7 mph and just dribbling across the line (except for the TTU C6 Z06 track car
). I personally would have preferred them end the course 20s back than what they did.
5. Since they had so much trouble with radio communication and timing, the novices could not get ride alongs by instructors and with 30/75 entrants as novice, it caused a LOT of DNFs.....oh excuse me....'off courses' (they gave me crap about calling them DNFs on the radio)....there was 2 locations on course that crossed back over the course...one was a half figure eight and the other was a 'skid pad' that you negotiate and when you go 360 degrees, then you continue going straight....so not only were there a lot of DNFs, there were half a dozen red flags due to people getting lost or faster cars catching up with slower cars....the people at start did not pay attention to which cars they may have to hold start up for (which I feel is an inherent responsibility of the start worker)
So after what, 7 pages in that thread in Club Discussion, I realize from an organizational and infrastructure standpoint, THSCC is in pretty good shape relative to what I saw yesterday
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