Chesapeake Region
Autocross In Review Words: Greg Hartke, Photos: Jim McKee
Autocross #3 on Saturday June 25th is now in the books and by all accounts we had another successful day of racing. This makes 5 events (AX School, Test & Tune, plus three full racing events) for 2022 with good weather, which I would deem to be a record the Potomac Chapter envies. POT has had 4 events (AX School plus three full racing events) and their AX#2 was contested in a deluge, followed by AX#3 for which it rained during setup and the first heat. They also had all kinds of interesting equipment problems for their AX#3 because they didn’t dry things out after the deluge of AX#2. As an interested participant and POT AX Committee member, I was thinking about what I would do if it rained like that during a CHS AX event and what I would have to do to dry things out. The good news is that now I know what happens if you don’t do anything. ;) I arrived at Prince George’s Stadium about 4:50 or 4:55 AM and AX Co-chair Brad Martinez was already there, rarin’ to go. OK, no one is rarin’ to go at that hour, but you get the idea. In fact, Brad had been out ‘til late (and I mean really late) with clients and he was one hurtin’ puppy that morning. Good thing he’s young. ;) John Cho arrived shortly after us and Mark Hubley shortly after John with the trailer of AX supplies. As we started to get things together, it was still sufficiently dark that I could enjoy the sight of Venus, Jupiter, and Mars in the morning sky and the International Space Station even passed by nearly directly overhead. Maybe I should have waved. ;) Mark drove the truck around while Brad and John dropped the cones on the lot along the course, then Mark went home to get his car while Brad and John assembled the course. Pinto Soin arrived around 5:30 and he and I got everything else set up in good order. I can’t even begin to tell you how great it is to have the mighty Pinto helping me in the morning at these events. At our previous two AX events, the hotspot was not working and we wound up using CHS Registrar Meilyng WigneyBurmaka’s personal cell phone as a hotspot, so we enlisted the aid of Treasurer Andy Powell, who worked with Tmobile to get that little problem straightened out and the hotspot worked fine this time. Phew! ‘Bout time. Funny thing, though. Everything was working fine for a while, but eventually we lost range on the iPads we use for the Starter to queue cars and also for the announcer. That caused some hiccups, but we worked around the problem (of course), though now that needs to be straightened out. Meilyng will be looking into that. There’s always something. ;)
Brad was not only about dead on his feet after very little sleep, he had to be in his DC office at 9:00 AM for a client meeting (likely to last all day), so he had to leave at 7:00. I don’t know how he survived that day, but I’ve heard from him since then, so I know he did. ;) When Brad left, the course was almost complete and John finished putting it together with Pinto’s help. With the course assembled (see the diagram below), it was time for John and me to go out and do the safety runs, always an important step because there’s always something that needs adjusting. After running the course several times, we made some minor tweaks, but we also discovered that the finish sequence was all wrong and had to be rebuilt. We fiddled with it and John eventually came up with the winning combination that I thought made for a good finish. Good job, John! Took a while for us to get it right, but in the end, we
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