The wildest time trial event? Lone Pine Time Trials

This year’s event sold out in less than 7 hours. The closest real city to the venue sits probably 3 hours away, and there are so few hotels in town that you could count them all on a single functional hand–with maybe only one or two backup fingers.

The Lone Pine Time Trials has been taking place since 1970. In that time, the stewardship of the event has been passed on from club to club and person to person, but the same mission remained: Keep the event alive.

There’s a specialness to this event that transcends simple cones and clocks. By all rights, there are plenty of things that are objectively wrong about the setup, too.

[Competing in a bucket list event: Lone Pine Time Trials]

The concrete, site of the former Manzanar Airfield, a WWII-era base built in 1939, is rougher than the surrounding California High Desert. No one brings their “good” tires because if the marbles don’t shred them, the potholes will. The competition is fierce in many classes, but don’t be surprised if the course changes slightly several times over the weekend to avoid newly formed potholes.

It’s also not always a particularly efficient event. With just over 2 miles of course, when a car breaks down–and several invariably do–a crew can take a while to get out to it and tow it back to the paddock. Car returned, its crew can then try to affect repairs to make another attempt at not slowing the event down.

And even if the broken cars don’t slow things down, the tumbleweeds, 50 mph wind gusts and assorted environmental hazards eventually catch up with reality.

Ask anyone in attendance if these factors conspire to make them think twice about attending this event, however, and they’ll look at you like you just fell to earth from the dumbest flying saucer in the galaxy.

The Lone Pine Time Trials survives because it’s incomparable in an autocross world that’s facing accelerating site loss, which casts a distant shadow on the very future of the sport. Lone Pine is an anachronism that’s being kept alive–deservedly so–out of sheer love of the game.

Located about 10 miles north of the actual city of Lone Pine, which sits in the shadow of Mt. Whitney, about 3 hours north of Los Angeles, the Manzanar Airfield sits square in the middle of a picturesque (criminal understatement) valley bordered on the west by the Sierra mountains and to the east by the Inyo range.

Some moisture makes it over the Sierras from the coast, but most of it gets absorbed by the mountains, leaving the Sierras green, lush and snowcapped, while the Inyos on the other side of the valley are brown and rocky. If there’s a more visually stunning autocross site anywhere in the world, we’d love to see pictures of it, but good luck finding any.

The event itself, while billed as an autocross, really feels more like an SCCA TrackSprint. Pylons are minimal, and this May 17-18, more than a few cars broke 100 mph on the 2.08-mile course. The long offset esses down the showcase runway are negotiated in third or fourth gear for most cars.

The course itself is a bit of a Ship of Theseus. “We try to run the same course each year, but that relies on us finding the marks from the previous years, which tend to get weathered away pretty easily,” current event steward Bret Norgaard admits. “Then, even if we do find them, we always have to make adjustments to work around pavement breakup.”

So it’s fair to say the course is “pretty much” the same every year, although charting it is a game of telephone with time and Whac-a-Mole with potholes and concrete degradation.

But you know what? No one cares about that part, either. On the nonzero number of occasions that organizers had to get on the PA to say, “Hey, we just had to move this offset over a few feet,” most everyone just listens with one ear, shrugs and goes back to talking with their fellow participants about their cool car or how they got off in the marbles on the previous run and went for a 75 mph spin. Or they just raise their heads and look around at the wonders of nature and think, “How the hell are we participating in our favorite sport HERE?”

But if you think about Lone Pine from the frame of reference of potholes or facilities or hotels or major highway access, you’re thinking about it all wrong. Lone Pine Time Trials is less about convenience and more about celebrating over half a century of this sport’s history by forging your own link to the past in one of the most beautiful places in the country.

It’s one of the last–if not THE last–outlaw autocrosses in the country, and you’d do well to make the trip to the California desert while it’s still happening. History isn’t going to last forever.

 

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