There's a big storm brewing in national solo...

2 quick questions--a little off topic but didn't think they needed a anew thread.  

Did a Honda Accord really take second place in H street? On further research it seems it is a v6 six speed. That makes more sense somehow.

What is the competition between the VW GTI transmissions like (manual vs dsg).--started a separate thread.

MadScientistMatt said:

Knurled. said:

The year that Nationals was done in Omaha were done this way.  Scroll your GRM-o-meter back to late 2014 and find the multipage thread we had about it here.  The fail was epic.

Is this the thread?

https://grassrootsmotorsports.com/forum/grm/2014-rallycross-national-championship-in-5-ish-day/91265/page1/

Looks like they had three roll-overs.

Yes that is the thread.Speaking of prophetic GRM thread titles.

In reply to loosecannon :

The SCCA got pretty lucky with that Corvette incident.  There were at least ten people within ten feet of the Corvette's final resting place.  Some of them were sitting down and most weren't watching the course.

Yeah, can we get some more commentary on all of those safety lapses please? Oregon Region was almost disbanded after a car off-course excursion in 08, I can't imagine how National got away with it. 

Here is a video from Tuesday Heat 6. I was standing just to the left of where he came to a stop. It was darker than the camera shows but (shot around 7:50 pm or so, we stopped running just before 8:30). Paul Wright DM East course There were a couple of safety issues that could have been better.  The usual line of yellow cones between the east side and west side was missing, as was the flour lines marking where the course goes (couldn't be put down due to rain) and there were a couple of places where drivers were getting confused and a simple wall of cones would have prevented drivers racing towards each other.  There is a lot of discussion about there being more drivers than ever at this years Nats and I think that was a contributing factor in the problems. 1400 competitors is possible to do but only if things run smoothly. Anything like poor weather, oil spills, timing problems, etc will put you on the back foot and any attempt to speed things up like sending cars at smaller intervals or running after the sun goes down will only result in dangerous situations. I think the SCCA does a great job and wouldn't consider this years Nationals a failure in any way. As an owner of a kart track, I know that sometimes, no matter how prepared you are, bad things will happen. I'm confident that next year will be better.

That worker station on the east course was a little scary.  Cars driving at you in two directions at the same time.  The one you weren't watching just had to blow a braking zone to end up where you were standing.

loosecannon said:

 The usual line of yellow cones between the east side and west side was missing, as was the flour lines marking where the course goes (couldn't be put down due to rain) and there were a couple of places where drivers were getting confused and a simple wall of cones would have prevented drivers racing towards each other. 

There is a lot of discussion about there being more drivers than ever at this years Nats and I think that was a contributing factor in the problems. 1400 competitors is possible to do but only if things run smoothly.

You hit tht nail on the head for the rain not allowing for the cone wall or chalking of course lines. Lots of people complained about this and this is the answer to those complaints. 

Raleigh the MC of the banquets stated a total rainfall of 6.5 inches over 4 days from Saturday to Tuesday and stated monthly average rainfall of 1.5 inches. I don't have anything to back those exact numbers but I got similar numbers from these sources. 

showing monthly total rainfall now of 5+ Inches and 2+ inches Tuesday

https://www.gwwilkins.org/wxgraphs-all.php

Wunderground showing over 2 inches. 

https://www.wunderground.com/history/weekly/us/ne/beatrice/KBIE/date/2018-9-8

Univ Nebraska Total monthly rainfall data

https://lincolnweather.unl.edu/data/monthly-precipitation.asp

SO these very high intensity rainfalls were compounded by the fact that we're on top of a a giant concrete pad and can't get anywhere quickly at that intensity.

The rain led to the concrete patch on east course getting destroyed and helped lead to the west course incident where the 800hp C7 corvette swapped ends and the brakes could no longer do any good.

The rain also led to the FJ Karts getting lost and or out of control into the other course. 

These things do happen, unfortunately, it doesn't matter how much planning we do and safety guidelines we write, things can still go wrong. 

In no less words, we wear helmets for a reason. 

Now, on your second point with the number of competitors, I'm going to disagree. The rain caused everything that can go wrong at an autocross, short of an injury, to go wrong. 

The call to stop runs at the end of the day was missed by 15, maybe 20 minutes and so lets say that we needed a full more hour of daylight to run all runs on both sides just to round high. 

We lost at least half an hour on each course to the east course surface issue and the west course corvette. Having to stop both courses for junior karts, after JA/JB started crossing the mid point, killed at least an hour on both sides. 

Both courses saw 2 heats with runs taking at least 20-30% longer due to the conditions. 3rd heat on east course Tuesday took over 3 hours with the course issue and slower runs. So lets call it 45 minutes of extra time added by that. 

So over 2, maybe 2.5+ hours of lost time due to the conditions and incidents

On top of these issues, because of the run days being predetermined 6 Months in advance, the first 2 competition days were loaded that if we had had a Thursday/Friday with similar numbers we would have had nearly 1500 people. 
 

Now, what we do need to do as a club is look at how we handle a couple things at Nationals to mitigate issues like what happened and prevent it derailing a day like it did. I'd summarize my takeaways in these questions/statements. But these are just a place I'm starting from. 

1. Regarding JA/JB, can we find a better way to handle them than in the middle of or beginning of competition days? 
   • I think we should make a spectacle of them and run them on Monday afternoon. it would cause a loss of minimal track walk time and prevent them from being an issue on the other days. 
2. We moved to hot worker swaps on Wednesday and beyond and that helped time on those days, this will need to be standard solo nats procedure in the future. 
3. Can we find an amicable way to move classes from one pair of days to another if run days get heavy loaded?
   • This is tough because people plan vacation days around the run work days, not everyone can come for the full week.
4. SEB has already stated that they are looking to standardize when courses are released to prevent "coursegate 2018" from happening again.
5. Better course visuals, these were an issue and with the lower barrier of entry to this event, which i'm 1000% in favor of, we need to be doing more to make sure courses are near impossible to get lost on from a safety standpoint. let people DNF, but don't let them get so out of place they can hit a worker or get in the path of another vehicle. 

Funny how the "Storm" about publishing the course layouts and subsequent usage thereof changed into a real storm. Apparently "prerunning" the course had about zero effect on the outcome.

Thanks for the update Loosecannon.

Thanks for the analysis Spacecadet.

The JA/JB thing is the biggest worry. That needs to be fixed.