Organized Cone Killing

BY PETER LINSKY

Once upon a time in our corner of the country, there existed something called “WOW”, in capital letters. They were a shortened acronym for a sanctioning body whose name in full was the Western Oregon and Washington Association of Sports Car Clubs, or WOWASCC. Member clubs were mostly in and around the Portland area, but as the name suggests, included clubs all over the western halves of Oregon and our neighboring state to the north. Its major activity was autocross, or slalom, as some called it, and for many years, it was very active. When I first arrived in Portland in 1968, I dove into WOW headfirst.

A few years earlier, after acquiring a new Triumph in Southern California, I tried autocross for the first time and began learning how to drive against the clock. I bought a good open-faced helmet and tinted face shield, installed wide seat belts and a rollbar, and tightened up the car’s suspension. Back then, the Los Angeles Times ran a sports car activity calendar every weekend in its automobile classified section so it was easy to plan how to attend a race, rally, or autocross as the mood struck. Since there were many sports car clubs very active around LA – There was a sanctioning body called “SCCSCC”, or Southern California Council of Sports Car Clubs”, or “Sick-sick”- I could count on finding an autocross somewhere within a reasonable distance of my home and others further afield if I cared to get up at Oh-Dark-Thirty on a Sunday morning. Popular sites included the Dodger Stadium parking lot and the huge paved expanse of Terminal Island which the Cobra Owners’ Club liked because it allowed high speeds. The Bay area, also being a hotbed of sports cars and racing, was home to a similar group, “Nick-sick”, or Northern California Council, etc. Running on my stock Michelin X radials, I was consistently an also-ran.

By the spring of 1967, I had relocated to bucolic Roseburg, Oregon, for my first real job in radio. Roseburg’s only foreign car dealerships sold VWs, Renaults, and eventually, Toyotas and Datsuns. The local VW store could service Porsches, as I learned when a neighbor and his wife purchased a new red 912 that was shipped down from Porsche Cars Northwest/Riviera Motors in Portland. There being little to do socially in Roseburg, the three of us conspired to form a new sports car club,

Hardware Party! Portland autocrossers cleaned up in the Tri-Cities back in 1969.