Chesapeake Region
Autocross In Review Words: Greg Hartke
Open mouth, insert foot. That’s my reaction to last month’s Autocross column in which I mentioned that CHS had been blessed with 5 events with good weather this year while Potomac had 2 out of 4 contested in the rain. So, what happened? CHS AX#4 at Prince George’s Stadium on July 9th was a drench fest! Talk about a comeuppance! Sheesh. Someone took a picture of me as I wandered around taking care of business; I looked like a drowned rat. That seems somehow appropriate. ;)
I’m getting ahead of myself, though. Let’s start from the beginning… I’m always keeping a careful eye on the forecast before a race and a week prior, the weather forecast was not threatening at all. I was also pleased to see that the registration filled earlier than usual, and we had a substantial waitlist. (We cap the registration at 65 because we feel we can give the best experience to participants with that as the maximum number.) Around mid-week, though, the forecast suddenly went to pot, and I resigned myself to a wet event that Saturday. And not just a wet one, a very wet one. The forecast was calling for something like an inch and a half of rain out of that system starting overnight (with accompanying flood warnings), so I knew we were in for it. We race in the rain??? Sure! Rain may throw a damper on other PCA events, but AX soldiers on. The only thing that stops us is lightning – that’s a significant safety item, so if there’s lightning in the area, we halt operations ‘til it passes. I was actually contacted the day before the race by PGS management asking if we were going to be racing Saturday; they thought we’d cancel because of the heavy rain forecast for the day. Nope! The show must go on and go on it did. Truth to tell, the driving was gangs of fun, though I’m not going to say all the other work of setting up, etc. was any fun under those conditions. Still, it was certainly worth it. Hey, look on the bright side. The driving rain cleaned the undercarriage of our cars. ;) This one was challenging right from the get-go. AX Co-chair Brad Martinez had developed a course design that I really liked, then when I sent it off to Registrar Meilyng Wigney-Burmaka to be included with the information to participants, I started having second thoughts. Was it suitable for the conditions? Hmm. It wasn’t long before Meilyng emailed me, asking if I really wanted to use that course for the predicted conditions, which jogged me to an immediate decision to save that design for a dry day (hopefully AX#5) and use another course design. I went through the designs I had from Brad and Meilyng and picked a very simple and straightforward (yet interesting) design that Meilyng had come up with months previously. I asked Meilyng for a minor tweak to the design and with that, we were set. To make matters complicated, Brad couldn’t make AX#4 due to work commitments and that was a serious problem because he always builds the course in the morning. What to do? Fortunately, John Cho has been helping Brad build the courses on event day, so I asked John to take over as lead course builder for this one. He thankfully accepted my request (phew! Thanks a bunch, John!), though I’ll bet he spent a sleepless night worrying about it because he’d never been in that particular role before. In addition, Pinto Soin usually helps me set up everything else while Brad and John build the course, but this time I asked Pinto to help John instead of helping me – it’s very helpful to have two people working on the course. Pinto (who is ever-
14
