...this is what I mean. BMC normally hosts 6 autocrosses a year. Our April weather was meh. I preemptively canceled the May event because it was forecast to pour all weekend. For the June event, the weather was beautiful the week before and then forecast to rain on event day. In the end it quit raining before setup and the weather was serviceable all day, but the damage was done and I only got half my usual turnout, so I lost a bunch of money. There was no July event, so of course weather was decent all month.
For last weekend, it's been hot and mostly dry for the last couple weeks, but the weekend forecast was 50% chance of scattered showers, and possible isolated thunder storms. Because I already had to cancel May I made the call to run the event. Turnout was maybe 70% of what I need to break even, so I lost money before the first car left the line. Weather was mixed, with mixed clouds and sun, and a light breeze. We got a few minutes of literally scattered sprinkles about halfway through the morning heat; not even enough to dampen the course. Conditions were about like this (video links are still broken, I guess:
We finished out the heat and gridded up for the afternoon heat. Then, in the span of 5 minutes, we went from that ^^^ to this:
https://www.facebook.com/plugins/video.php?href=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.facebook.com%2Ffacebook%2Fvideos%2F10217467216098520%2F&width=500&show_text=false&height=281
There are 4 laptops, the UPS, and the timing console under those tents. My daughters got hit in the back and head by that flipping table as they were trying to hold the tent down. I'm about 100 yards past the tent trying to get a bag over the scoreboard and stop it flying away. The start / finish eyes and the yagi antennae were on their own.
The tents were maybe 50 yards from the Turn One grandstands at Dover Speedway, maybe 100 yards south of the Monster. Under the tent we suddenly heard loud white noise, which turned out to be rain hammering on the aluminum stands. In about the time it took to say, "Is that rain?", it went from no rain to a total downpour.
We got about 3 minutes of really heavy rain. Then, like a switch was thrown, the 5 mph breeze went to 50 mph gale. Instead of straight down, the rain was horizontal. You see the carnage above. It went on like that for about 10 minutes, then quit. This was extremely localized. We were like climbers on the north face of the mountain - it came up from behind the speedway, and we had no way to see it. It wasn't on the radar. Areas 2 miles away didn't get any rain. 20 minutes after this, the sun was shining.
And the capper? Yesterday I had one of the drivers trash talking us because we ended the event instead of resuming for the afternoon heat. He said we could have at least given fun runs if the timing system wasn't working. Of course, he was safe and dry in his car on grid, not out there helping keep the berking tent from flying to berking Oz...