The 24 Hours of Lemons Forums → Bench Racing → A word about the 3rd-strike/3-hour-timeout policy
I for one welcome the decrease in rollovers. :-/
I also welcome our shiny-side-up overlords.
At Autobahn, we got the third BF with 2 hours to go. We had no idea why the car spun out
. Once we got home, we discovered the impact with the wall in turn 6 was much more damaging than we had originally thought. The once rigid frame turned to mush, especially the Left front that had went un-noticed at the track. At least it had some silver sprayed flames on it, thanks sam!
No. Thank YOU Dave! You guys were great sports.
I have no problems with this policy at most tracks - I went the entire kart season with one off in the dry and one scuff mark on a bumper and wished we ran cleaner contact rules in that sport - but Stafford Springs Speedway poses a special problem.
In general we have 30 to 50 feet of track width and that's plenty to avoid someone without putting a wheel off no matter where you are. Even at the special Lemons chicane merge points they're in the middle of a point-and-squirt section so you aren't going to try a pass into there; there's always a better spot, and a faster exit from the chicane finds that better spot more often than not.
Stafford's different.
The merge point at turn one is very bad. It's worse than even the dive-bomb off-ramps on New England highways. Every driver in the Stafford Springs race is fine with the 75-MPH-freeway-to-25-MPH-left-side-off-ramp-pass-round-the-outside-then-get-on-the-brakes-midcorner routine; we'll even do it before we get to Dunkin' Donuts in the morning.
The problem is that the entrance isn't really two cars wide and is in the one spot where a car can overtake another that's posting similar laptimes. Put fifty to seventy cars on the half-mile track single file and that's one car every 35-50 feet, which is half a really good car's stopping distance from 60 and a quarter of what the driver's manual says to leave between you and the car in front. Subtract 10-18 feet for the length of your car and you can see why we cannot run single file on that track. That applies to every section equally as any areas where cars are separated by more space must cancel with areas with less.
If the inside driver drives a little "fat" into turn 1, either there will be contact with the car beside it, or the outside car is in the dirt. Any drivers behind them will then get into the brakes HARD and that's when the really nasty things happen. More draconian penalties make this worse; there simply isn't anywhere to go when anything goes wrong and the avoidance maneuvers people pull to make sure that their car doesn't go two-off get progressively stupider as the day goes on and teams try to avoid the long penalties.
There is no penalty to the inside or trailing driver for doing this, which is exactly backwards. This creates the additional hazard that the smart strategy is to be on the inside at all costs going into 1 - which turns the frontstretch into the I84/I91 junction in Hartford at 7 in the morning.
My suggestion for that track is to declare the dirt outside turn 1 part of the racing surface, and institute the following penalty:
Absolutely No Crashing In Turn 1 At Stafford Penalty: If there is a collision in Turn 1, and your car has new marks on the bow or to starboard, you are parked for three hours. If your car has new marks to port or stern, you receive a Lousy-Driving Penalty. If you somehow manage to strike a car entering the track on Turn 1 of the oval, there is no penalty for your team other than a driver change, but for the driver - lifetime ban.
This is exactly why I won't even consider Stafford.
Yeah, that track sucks for Lemons. I think we're done there after two outings. Too many nice road courses out there to mess with a crappy roval.
Stafford doesn't suck - it's great short track racing - but it's just not like the other tracks we run and the rules treat it the same, and shouldn't.
During the race, the organizers tried many configurations of cones, lines, rules, etc. to try to tame Turn 1. None of them worked because there simply isn't racing room there. Every other corner can be treated normally, and there were very few offs* and very little contact elsewhere.
Just treat it differently and it'll be fine. We're all used to driving on snow and on dirt back roads, and it's not like dirt is expensive to replace after the race.
*Aside from a certain gold-and-red Accord with a rear bar that was three sizes too large and a bunch of go-kart racers behind the wheel.
I remember fondly Judge Jonny's posts on how all of us on the West Coast were such absolutely horrible drivers. There was always a post on how many hundreds of black flags we'd receive within days of our race. Thunderhill and Sears were both in the multiple hundreds.
Then the hammer came down in May and not only did the destruction derby-mentality fade, our lap times drastically decreased. Racing was clean, people were considerate, and everyone was having an awesome time on track. Our last two outings (Goin'-For-Broken/Arse-Sweat) have been cleaner, faster, and more destructive (as we've lost 2 engines in those races).
Hmm... I've gotten my only black flag and blown up 2 engines since the rules came into effect compared to no BFs and surviving engines in the 2 previous races...
Bring back the rollovers!
(j/k, the enforcement of the rules is great for the rest of us)
At Stafford we had to be a little more selective about who got totally hammered in the Penalty Box and who got mercy. We determined this by watching the race and taking note of the super-hairball drivers.
The 24 Hours of Lemons Forums → Bench Racing → A word about the 3rd-strike/3-hour-timeout policy
