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My only criticism of the course is that IMHO it is not necessary to use every cone in the trailer. Making a course visually confusing doesn't make it "better" it just makes for a lot of DNFs (and frustrated novices that may never return). AX is a precision driving event, not a vision accuity/pattern recognition test. After setting up the course, walk it and look critically at every cone placement and numbers: does this cone(s) have any affect on the line between the previous feature and the next (i.e. would you drive the same line if it was removed)? If the answer is no then either move it or eliminate it. There is seldom reason for walls of cones since most are superflouos to the path and one cone or a dozen hit still usually will result in a poor run and it just punishes the course workers having to reset an armful of cones.
This is not limited to just local events, there has been much discussion of poor course design at national events as well. It would be good if every budding course designer would first read Roger Johnson's (one of the perennial National Championship course designers and the course design guru) online course design handbook for suggestions on what constitutes good course design and how to modify cone placement of common features to make them challenging but not "painful" or dictating of line.

I have been lobbying SCCA to adopt the use of contrasting color cones for all non-penalty pointer cones at national events.

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SPIN or WIN!
there's no glory for going slow.

Sounds like you need to talk to Roger Johnson about the cone confusion thing; I stole several elements from his courses to use on this one. Also, if you don't use all the cones available then why do you have so many? (j/k - I've bitched about that at times, too)

I really didn't see why people were DNFing unless they just didn't remember where to go next or were looking 10 ft in front of the car. Either way, tough luck - if you want to be fast, you'll know the course & look ahead... if you don't look ahead or know where to go then don't blame the course.

I also suspect that we had somebody calling DNF's at one point who didn't know a DNF from their... uh... well. You know. (that was around the point when Mike W. "DNFed")

I've now been around long enough to offer some historical perspective... more than some, but I realize not nearly as much as some real old timers...

This year's courses have been different from most of the ones in years past. For years, when I ran THSCC I felt that we had some of the best courses, especially compared to other clubs I ran. They were generally fairly quick, open and easy to follow (except for Morrisville). In the Dishman era, he was very good at training event chairs. He was also good at requiring pointer cones where they needed to be and working with the designers to make the course less visually confusing.

If you think they are confusing now.. there were times long ago when they were much, much worse! The club once used the double cone instead of pointers to indicate the inside of the turn. I think Mike D. was instrumental in getting us to switch to the use of pointer cones consistently. That was really a big help. Anyway.. our courses usually had wide gates, with plenty of space in between each element. If there was a 45' slalom, it was only to slow you down for something, not a standard spacing! Third gear in the past was not uncommon. That may or may not be a good thing, depending on your car and point of view.

What follows are my observations about this year, not cricisms.

This year's courses have featured:
- a much slower average speed than in year's past
- The gate width for many (most?) gates has been 15'.
- many slaloms have featured 45' spacing
(60 feet or more was the usual in days gone by)
- the gates are MUCH closer together than in year's past
- we have not used pointer cones as well as we used to for clarity
- courses have had very, very few open sections (compared to what we used to call an open section).
- we have had a higher input density on many courses


Input Density.... If you rquire the driver to make too many left/right inputs in a short time, the course just feels to busy and choppy. If the gates are spaced properly, the input density will enough to allow the course to feel like there is a real flow to it. It won't become an exercise in seeing how fast you can turn the steering wheel at every gate. If the input desnity is too low, there is simply not enough to do. (Corvette club courses actually suffer that problem at times.) By the way, I like turns. If I wanted a straightaway only, I'd do drag racing.

If you take most of this year's courses, and increase the distance between gates, you'd probably have a much better course. This year, with narrow gates, we get more cone hits and no choice of line.

When the gates are too close together, you don't have time to set up for the next feature and you are much more likely to get the sea of cones effect. This causes visual confusion and more DNFs.

I'm not talking about elminating the "small car" sections. A good course will not favor either high or low HP cars. A section that favors a small car does not have to be super tight, by the way.

When the gates are too close together, you can't see two or three gates ahead as easily, and that too causes DNFs.

Roger Johnson's material is good stuff. But I feel that it is mainly geared for an experienced course designer that needs to improve his concepts of what makes a good design. It is also a bit overwhelming to a novice designer.

I sometimes think that THSCC needs a NOVICE or First Timer's course design handbook that deals with some THSCC unique issues, which includes site specific challenges. I have put some time into developing such a document. I'm happy to get input from staff and experienced folks when I finish a draft. This may take awhile....

Such a document would provide guidelines on distances and spacings for those who have never done courses before, among other things. Most novice designers don't appreciate early on how different everything looks at speed.

One big problem we have in this club is event chair traning, specifically with regard to course design. We have used the mentor approach for awhile, but it seems clear to me that isn't sufficent by itself.

I have some ideas on how to improve that, but Ive babbled enough for now.

By the way, many, many thanks to the event chairs that have sweated and sacrificed to bring us this year's events. I do appreciate all the work that has been done and that has gone into each one of them. Thanks everybody!


Miles

A couple of quick additions to Mile's comments:

1) Keep in mind that Roger Johnson's courses that we try to use were designed for MUCH bigger sites that are essentially square. They don't scale down well to narrow runways or smaller lots.

2) Regarding slalom (traditional format or chicago box, etc. format) spacing. According to an autocrossing geek developed and proven (not me) formula, a 45 foot cone spacing results in a maximum theoretical speed of 36 mph . . . for my 68 inch wide formula car on slicks pulling 1.4 g's in cornering. It is a lot slower in real cars, especially if they are wider than 68 inches. Even a 60 foot spacing is only 48 mph in my car. In a real car I recommend a 60 foot spacing for fun at a "slow" speed. FYI I think the car mags use 100 foot spacing which is too fast for us (79 mph for my car)

Dick

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Dick Rasmussen

FS 50 2018 Mustang GT

Kevin,

In regard to calling DNF's. During the second group I watched lots of drivers make the same exact mistake (I was working station 1 but the DNF's were in the vicinity of station 4). People clearly drove on the wrong side of a row of cones with a pointer. I didn't see Mike's but another corner worker at Station 1 said that Mike made the same mistake so many others were making.

Dick

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Dick Rasmussen

FS 50 2018 Mustang GT

Re: Course design, etc

Danville specific:

IMHO, we made one mistake (a biggie). The overlap was approx. 40 seconds (depending on the starter). That's 10 seconds longer than it should be.

138x10x4/3600 = 1.5 hours

That was my mistake.

Ironically, a longer course (all on the taxiway side) could have given us all that time right back.

To the defense of the event chairs/officers, there was a disabled vehicle in the middle of the course until dark. It was a casualty of the Chick school, and wasn't repaired until then. Yeah, we could have made the guy push it off the ramps and fix it elsewhere, etc. We didn't (instead, we offered to help him fix it - just in case another pair of hands could replace a water pump quicker).

General comments:
The average experience level of the officers has dropped dramatically in the past few years (me included). I'll leave it to the most experienced people to chime in as to why that's the case. In the mean time, I suggest anyone that doesn't like the way things are going just keep in mind that yall elected 3 autocross VP's that had collectively chaired about 2 events. They are learning everything they need to know the hard way, yet we didn't exactly have people beating down the door to take the job.

Scott

Thanks, Dick. I based my observation on the huge number in a row that seemed to be right around a worker change, and Mike's comment that he did the exact same thing the second time that he did the first without a DNF. Could the great Whitney truly be mistaken?

Man, would you guys quit beating yourselves up?!? I think you're all doing a GREAT job! The only complaint I have is that you're not having enough FUN!

Seriously. This is a volunteer job. Knowledge transfer is incredibly difficult, since "paperwork" takes a backseat to real priorities in life. AND there is always going to be a high turnover rate.

I think it's great. But it's a fact of life that more officer learning will come from learning from mistakes than hearing it from someone else. I learned SO MUCH from my own mistakes my first year as VP -- that was the main reason I signed on for a second year as VP. I wanted to do it all better the 2nd time around. But by the 3rd time it was getting boring

I think the VPs should re-up.

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Mike Whitney
whit32@gmail.com, 919-454-5445
V10, V8, V8t, I6, I6, V6, F4t, I4, I4, I4, I4, I2, 1, 1

Kevin, I'm not trying to pick on you here, I said in the other thread I actually liked the course design I just thought there were too many cones out there that had no affect on the line of the run. I've run enough RJ course designs to know he sometimes uses multicone slallom walls etc, but at Topeka the courses are HUGE, the spacing is equally as huge, IS designed to punish the drivers who overdrive and get late (intimidation factor) and it's not a configuration used for every gate. Often times LESS cones will produce a wider difference between those that look ahead and those that don't.
At nationals the drivers are not likely to be novices and hopefully have learned to look ahead, but at this event for example a full 20% of the drivers were novices many who think they need to memorize the location of every cone and/or just see a forest of orange at speed. I mentored one and understood his frustration and problems with finding the course since the "walls" meant different things at different points on the course. Even Donna had problems with that on her first run resulting in a DNF. (course workers not knowing what constitutes a DNF is another issue entirely that may need to be addressed) The cone arrangement should help "suggest" what the feature is and distinguish one type of feature from another as well as give a clue as to where to go next IMHO.

_________________
SPIN or WIN!
there's no glory for going slow.

August 05 Greenville Course Map-


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_ _ Start ----------- _ _ Finish

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02 Focus SVT
STF 9

I don't feel picked on or anything. I like to hear what people think, whether it's good or bad. I briefly considered using the rallycross course design approach, but I figured too many people would complain that 95% of the cones were still on the trailer & there was too much open space. Maybe next time...

Hey, do we have a chair for the Greenville "fun" event?

Ryan...is that straight an uphill straight, downhill straight or level straight?

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Your AXVP's are running double duty Vincent Keene and I

Im secretly riding in the trailer on the way to Greenville and I am gonna throw half the cones out of the trailer on 264.

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02 Focus SVT
STF 9

I honestly was not criticizing. I like the course this weekend. I had only slept two hours the night before and about 8 total in the three nights before that. I had proven before that for me to try autocrossing on fried brains is really not a very good idea. Now the evidence is overwhelming.

I made, and still make my share of mistakes. The reason for these discussions in my viewpoint is to see if there is a way to improve things.

Mike Whitney said:



What Mike said is absolutely key. Knowledge TRANSFER. As a volunteer organization, I think we do a pretty good job of this overall. We are documenting things and continuing to improve our systems. We are seeing a bit of change in the guard with regard not just to new officers, but new event chairs. The new officers are doing fine, but they have a crop of new event chairs to work with in many cases too- which makes it doubly hard. For years, events seemed to be run by many of the same folks, and now, thankfully, we have a new generation stepping up to the plate. This is all good, for without them, the club events woudl just stop happening.

So, I'm not complaining. I just see an opportunity to improve in this area. It isn't bad, but we can make it better.


Suggestions for improvement on KNOWLEDGE TRANSFER
relating to course design and event chair duties:


I think it would help if we made event chair traning, and specifically course design training, a classroom part of the intermediate or advanced autox school. This would help educate our next generation of drivers and future event chairs.

I had suggested holding an event chair school early this year to the officers (it didn't fly), but a better idea might just be to include that training into our advanced schools.

Do you think we could get people to come to a Friday night classroom session? Regardless of the event chair training discussion, I think a Friday night classroom session to teach driving techniques and fundamentals would be a great way to get students farther, faster in the next day's schools.Such a session would not need to be the responsibility of the event chairs for the school.

If we taught something about course analsis and course design, the most experienced officers and course designers should have input into and be able to approve this "course design school" curriculum. The last thing we want to do is to propagate ideas that don't work by teaching them to others! On the positive side... to be able to share the experience and wisdom of course design from our best course designers is a good thing. This would also result in it being an easier step to take for first time event chairs.

I honestly think we could put soemthing together in time for the int/adv school this October. I would be willing to help out with that.

Thoughts?

Miles[/quote]

Too many, too few cones, who really cares. I thought the course was pretty good. Hell, any autocross event is a good one. I loved Morrisville The only course I disliked was the 2002 Peru National course. Not a bad track record considering all the events I have run in the past year.

I do agree with Scott about the point of lack of experience. But people can not be afraid to ask for help or pointers. That is the best way to learn.

Walking the course yesterday, there was only one change I would have made. Moving two cones one foot each. One to the left and one to the right. I was half-joking with people on a walk-thru that if the course was not marked, I would just bump them over. Yes, they were the "Kenny" cones at station 4.

Those people complaining really need to step up and do it. The constant complaints about couse design and how it favors one car, too many cones, not enough cones, too fast, too slow, too wide, too narrow only cause people to step away and say, I do not need this crap.

The funniest sight, one the cones in the offsets of the downhill section bend in half when I came through. I have never seen that before.

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Jim Pastorius
2008 Silverado VortecMax
1992 Camaro CMC#92
2002 BMW R1150R

2009 3rd Place CMC Mid-Atlantic Championship
2009 CMC Hyperfest Winner