Interesting discussion. Sorry I missed the Marina event Sunday as I
really like running on concrete, but I wasn't too far away crewing
for son Rod's Spec Miata. Anyway I thought I would throw this in the
discussion as to how good we have (or don't) have it in SFR: While
you all were enjoying events from mid-July to mid-September, I was
stuck on a temporary assignment in Cocoa Beach, Florida. As the
folks I worked with were a 5-day-week bunch the weekends were pretty
slow and on two of the Sundays I struck out to observe how Solo II
was done there.
I checked out Central Florida Region events at their De Land Airport
site and Indian River Community College site. Each was about a 90
minute drive from where I was staying so it would be fair to guess
that at each event some folks had a 3-hour drive each way as I
recognized some of the same people at both events. The event sites
were tiny compared to anything we run on. IRCC was a police
training pad and had decent asphalt but even with a good sized loop
in the course (nearly a two lap configuration) the typical run was
only 30 seconds in the rain. De Land is an abandoned piece of runway
that is rapidly deteriorating and "looser" than our GGF site so the
course was essentially a slalom up one side, turn around, and slalom
back down the other side, and the times were in the 25-second range.
Their mode of operations was to run Saturday as a practice event and
Sunday for points. On Sundays there were about 40 cars (and 60
drivers) in two run groups with a mix of cars that didn't seem to
break down by class (i.e. CS and ES Miatas in both groups, etc.)
Each run group got one "heat" in the morning and one in the
afternoon, with each "heat" comprising 5 runs. (And "heat" seemed to
be an appropriate term :) So with all the "inconveniences" of our out
of town events, and typical large turnouts for the "local" events, I
still prefer our situation.
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