Monday, September 26, 2011

Tucson Course Layout - Day 1

2 years and 2000 miles away from the East Coast, who would have thought that I would find myself on dirt with the Evo again. This time I find myself in the Southwest at the "sunniest city" in North America: Tucson Arizona! Lots of dirt, lots of land, lots of motorheads make a great recipe for off-road venue potential.

In the past couple of months, I've been helping a group of rally enthusiasts with breaking new grounds at a potential new location for a rally racing venue in the South East side of town. Long and short of it is there was a lot of blood/sweat/tears poured into clearing up trees, fences, brushes, cactus's, etc, and with 90% of most obstacles cleared, it has now come time to actually lay down a course. With my background in organizing three years of my own rallycross events (many of you have most likely attended) and 7 years in being a stage commander with Rally New York, I went ahead and laid in a tentative course using aerial photos and a little photochop skillz.

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~~~~~~~~End of the Day Report ~~~~~~~~

Today the planning went better than expected. Originally we were only planning to get half of the course laid out due to the lack of cones, shortage of day-light, but ended up laying out the entire course with plenty of time to take the Evo for a few spins to test the course for safety, speed, and the surface.

The first part of the course is more technical, with a switch-back and tight slaloms, I was only able to get the Evo up to about 30mph. We went back and adjusted it so that the switch-back wasn't so difficult; Evo was able to hit about 35 after adjustment. The second half of the course is much more opened up, and we realized we hit almost 45 mph on a straight section on the first time around. We had to make a few adjustments, and were able to slow the course down to about 35.

The crazy thing that confused both Lee and myself was the last section; gravel. We both thought the speeds would be much higher on the gravel surface but ended up causing the Evo to hang its tail out in a drift throughout almost every turn...quite frustrating as a driver, but as far as course design it works because the surface naturally forces the driver to slow down toward the finish.

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The surface held up really well for the 6 runs we did, but visibly some areas started to loosen up. Contrary to what I'm used to (mud, grass), there was still plenty of traction in the loose dirt. Unfortunately we have to be careful about loose surface because it causes too much dirt to be kicked in the air (a big no-no for the land owner and its surrounding customers).

Next step: the land owner has gratefully offered to water our track couple times each week to see if that will cause the earth underneath to solidify. Worst case we will need to throw mulch down in areas prone to loosening up and dump water frequently in those areas so the moist can stay in the dirt longer. We will be running a few more times to check out logistics and finalize the course before officially opening up the venue for a registered and sanctioned motorsports event.

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