Benjamin D Thatcher wrote:
>Oh, and the old saw about speed kills seems to have seeped into autocross
>thinking. I guess we've heard if for so long that we just assume it's
>true. A relatively high speed straight with a straight braking zone
>leading into a solid corner isn't nearly as dangerous as some who think
>putting offsets and quick kinks before a slow corner will "slow things
>down." Often the autocross "cure" is worse than the disease.
Kevin Stevens followed with:
> That's not really the point, though. The point is that SCCA Solo II is
sold
> to insurance vendors, participants, and site purveyors as having certain
> risk characteristics. One of those is a speed limit, another is minimum
> runoff distance. We'd damn well better start paying attention to ALL of
> them.
I couldn't agree with Kevin more.
Except that I think that Alex Tziortzis has the situation nailed -- and he
was there:
Alex wrote:
>So, in my opinion, the two things that cause the incident were:
>
>1. Course design was too fast for the maneuver (ie, go fast and then
>make some tight ass kink to "slow" cars down)
>2. Driver not GIVING IT UP.
When I was a SCCA Solo II Safety Steward, I took seriously both the rules
and guidelines under which an SCCA Solo II was to be run and upon which Solo
II insurance was issued. Why?
1) Those were the rules of the sport.
2) The cost of our insurance was based on those rules and guidelines being
followed.
3) I wanted everyone to have a safe event, myself included. And especially
the hotshoe who is just showing up for his first event.
4) Whichever region I was working for at the time was depending on me to
protect their proverbial ass. This was especially important to me when the
region I was working for was my own.
All this stuff is important, because if you neglect to follow your own
rules, a signed waiver can be meaningless.
Do the reported speeds at Route 66 absolve the driver from fault? No. But
neither does his trying to "save the run" completely absolve the region
holding the event.
I remember running the Cendiv Championship in 1992 (I believe) at Hawthorne
Park Raceway (horses) in Chicago. It was, at that time, the fastest event I
had ever run, and also the first I had run on real autocross tires
(A-008R's). The lot was long and narrow. On the outbound part of the
course, there was right-hand sweeper that made me rather nervous
(mid-60mph). Even though there was plenty of sliding room on the outside of
the curve before the brick wall, it doesn't look like it at almost 70.
Coming back in was a slalom with cones spaced at 75 foot intervals. On one
run, as I bounced off the rev-limiter (62 mph) in my Pontiac Grand Am GT, I
had finally achieved a nice, drifting dance between the cones when I reached
the last one -- which led to an offset gate to the right. I forgot to
counter-steer to correct my drift and found myself in a broadslide at about
60mph. When the car suddenly hooked up I was heading straight for the edge
of the parking lot, which offered both a tall curb, then a several foot drop
to the sidewalk next to the street (remember, this is IN Chicago). Needless
to say, I stopped "racing" RIGHT NOW.
Unfortunately for some, "common sense", isn't so common.
-- Don4
ES '91 VW Jetta (a car that has *definitely* smoothed out my driving style)
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