Good morning LSXtasy, nascar03,
The pictures do not lie and do an excellent job of showing what the course was like. As I recall it was around 560 m in length. It does not allow for a lot of acceleration and I was under the same impression that it would favor the smaller, lighter, nimbler import cars. There was a track prepped 1980's vintage Mustang that was very fast, a FD that was quick but the most interesting cars I found to watch were a pair of maybe 1990's Civics. These cars were also well worked on and were blindingly fast, both getting 2nd gear tire spin on the straight bits the whole length - sort of fun to see.
I know from talking with some of the other drivers they had hoped to see cars placed in different categories rather than in one group but given that this is the Dawson Creek Autocross Club's 3rd event they did a stellar job and maybe they will think about this in the future.
But given where we are living, in the far north of BC and Alberta, I think we ought to consider ourselves very lucky that we have such a group, people as decicated as Tri, Brian, Bob and the slew of volunteers to put something like this on and the very generous support of the person who owns/manages the shopping center parking lot to permit this event to take place. The DCAAC hopes to grow this event in 2013 and I will certainly be attending when my work and farm allow me. The nicest part was not only how much I enjoyed this event but how much my son, gf and parents also enjoyed it. It was an excellent family day.
I think the funniest part was how you learn how much practice plays in doing well in an event like this. There was a C6 ZR1 modded to 710 hp. The driver had done this at least once or possibly twice before (he only had the car for 3 weeks as I recall). He was able to break into some 46 sec times. He then let one of the Civic drivers take his ZR1 for a lap who subsequently set the fastest time of the day - 43 seconds flat!!! I would not have expected that the ZR1 would have dominated like that but it goes to show how much of a difference a driver with experience can have in something like this.
I think what also helped them was that the number of cars started to drop off in the mid afternoon. I have a 2 hour drive home myself and so I left at 4. My own best time I think was 48.6 seconds. As they started to makes their runs more frequently the car tires started to get hotter and to work better. While it would be loads of fun to see more cars participating at the same time having it a small tight event like this when there may have not been more than 15 cars at at one time (some always coming and going) allows you to make more runs.
The course repeats itself so you can't run multiple cars at say 15 sec intervals, on a larger track where you could run more than one car at a time you would be able to be making passes more often.
I can't recommend trying something like this, participating, even just volunteering if you want to see what it is like at first and best of all having the change to do something like this without risking getting hurt/hurting someone/losing your license!
Cheers,
Garry
