As Assistant Chief Operating Steward (assigned to North Course Thursday,
South course Friday), I can tell you that we were shooting for 20-25
seconds between starts. We started out each heat with a single car,
moved to 30 seconds or so very quickly, and then dropped from there.
There were heats in which there were a fair number of reruns (North
Course CM comes to mind), but part of that was spin-itis--which wouldn't
have been helped much, I think, unless we went to hugely bigger gaps.
Most of the reruns we had Thursday were due to actual garbage blowing
through the lights (half empty water bottles, dropped course maps, snack
wrappers, etc.--surprise! your maid didn't follow you to Topeka to clean
up after you). We also had concerns in one or two heats about really,
really big gaps between individual times for given competitors (one run 4
seconds faster than another). In those cases, we gave provisional reruns
in case the markedly faster run time was protested.
On the South course, there was at least part of one heat where the gap
edged downward toward 15 seconds, but in that stretch, there were no
reruns (198 cones on the South course, nearly 260 on the North--you
figure it out). We also lengthened the gap at times based either on
class of car or characteristics of an individual car or driver.
All in all, the course workers (as well as the starters and chiefs of
course) worked their tails off in doing a great job, and nearly 1100
competitors were run with no need for headlights. ( : Woo hoo.
mlc
'91 MR2 NA
5th heat TW and nervous about finishing times
-----anything after this, I didn't write, and don't necessarily agree
with----
________________________________________________________________
http://dl.www.juno.com/get/tagj.
|