Dry Lakes Racers Australia

Norm wrote:That would be great. Track for bikes and a track for cars. YAHOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

Why ?

what would make more sense would be a track for cars and "A" bikes, and a track for all the other bikes. and a third track for.... never mind
Two long courses would be nice, but we would need even more timing gear, and that stuff aint cheap

G

I think we simply need to get the Track 1 and Track 2 layouts we used this year working smoothly rather than make any more changes ...

I also seem to remember that there was only enough room for a two mile course with the 1/4 timed on Track 2 rather than having the whole mile timed to the three mile ....

The current rule related to Courses is all about Vehicle speed and not the type of Vehicle .... can't see any point in changing that either ...

Pete

One of the issues that I noticed that cars/bikes using the wrong track . ie 125 pass on the long course.(WTF) This happened so many times this year it wasnt funny.

Process need to be fine tuned. Even down to being ready when the track is open.

I wasnt at the start line but I was told that there were a number of issues.

We all must work togerther as we are all there for the one purpose.

We had short course competitors on the long course at various times because the short track was closed because of the wet return road. I was suddenly swamped with short course competitors telling me they should have priority because they were next in line on the short course and at the same time I had long course competitors complaining that they had waited too long already and now these short course people were pushing in. What would you do in that situation?

We struggled to get enough people to run the start line on the short course. Nobody was prepared to run it for the whole week. We had two first time visitors run it very well for a day but they had to leave early. The two start lines were too far apart for me to even try to manage both. I had good volunteers to help me but nobody could stay all week so we had insufficient continuity. That will improve next year when my brother returns.

I even had people complaining about waiting. I'm sure some idiots thought I was just standing there all week and taking my own sweet time deciding when the next competitor could leave. Here's a message for them : I give the all clear every time AS SOON AS I get it from the timing van. The same fools complained that it was hot (when it wasn't bloody freezing) and they had nothing to drink! Whose fault is that??

The endless radio chatter required to get information to the timing van was so unnecessary, if the timing van was at the start line I could have walked it over, or they could have been close enough to see for themselves who was next on each course. My shitbox radio turned itself on to open mike whenever it felt like it and nobody could tell me. The radio in the timing van kept cutting out mid message. Many times I had to wait extra time for the all clear because speeds were being radioed in bulk to Greg Wapling. We need a computer system that automates that procedure and more.

We didn't have observers to watch competitors on course. We NEED two observers sitting on a raised structure of some kind high enough to easily see the whole track distance whose only job is to watch each competitor while they are on course and advise Animal if they don't complete their run. A few times we lost competitors who pulled off early and returned to the pits. It wasted so much time hunting along the long course and finally through the pits only to find the competitor on their trailer!

And for no good reason we had a lunch break every day! WHY?? If I can eat on the run so can everybody else! That probably wasted about a hundred runs over the week.

NO bike racers were ever unable to start when they got the all clear from me. It was always the cars who couldn't get themselves organised on time. They wouldn't even come up to the line half the time. You would think that they would take into account what they had to do to be ready on time, but that seemed to be beyond them. To be fair, most cars were cooperative but the delays were caused by problems beyond my control. I got so sick of "competitors" who wouldn't come near the start line!

And if anybody thinks they could easily do a better job than me they're very welcome to try. I'll just sit back and laugh as they f**k it up !

Chief Starter and Cat Herder Dave

I got to say the single Line system that was used on Track 2 worked really well, it was much better than having two Lines ... I could see exactly where I was in relation to the Start Line .....

Pete

Dave it sounds like you need help (out on the lake I mean ) Big Knob racing will endeavor to have one of our team with you to help herd cats who can't quite work out what a single line is each day of Speedweek 2016 ...I am sure others will also be willing to help

Thanks Norm, I think maybe I need help fullstop ! I think with me, my brother and one of your guys for a full day every day we should be on top of things nicely. Now we need a few people to run the short course. A few of this year's long course volunteers would be easily capable of doing it.

If we get some of the other improvements I mentioned things will flow smoothly. As I mentioned in another post we got a lot of runs on Thursday and Friday so at about 5 minutes average between runs we are getting close to optimum. We might be able to cut another 30 seconds off that.

I think I feel better now

David
Course 1
Course 2
G

One and two? I thought it was B and C!

You're both wrong - It's Track 1 and Track 2

Track 1 has the option of short course and long course
Track 2 is just short course

I would like to thank Dave for his efforts all week on the Long Course (track 2). I made sure every day we ran we took him a snack and a drink.
# The single line system is great, we had no problems with this.
# Someone raised the point of slower vehicles running on the long track, well we do that, but we are ready to run, no bullshit on the startline and pull off at the 3& 3/4 exit. The reason we do this is we want a mile speed, not a 1/4 mile, if you are running in the top of your class records in the world you want to know where you are at over the mile not the 1/4. There is more time wasted from people not being ready to go and radio issues it sounds like then slower vehicles running on the long track. We would be happy to run the short track if it had a measured mile and the ability to send a chase vehicle to pick the bike up. these two points it did not have this year.
# Thursday and Friday runs flowed great, maybe because most of the vehicles were pushing records and driver riders were ready to go.

Im with Pete above, leave it how it is and fine tune it. If possible get a measured mile on the shorter course and that will remove us slow vehicles from the long course. I felt like I was really moving at 109.5mph lol

Thanks to all the volunteers and staff for a great week. JP AAA Racing

Thanks JP, what you've said makes a lot of sense. I really don't mind who runs on which track, just as long as they are ready to go as soon as I give the all clear. Good luck at Bonneville. By the way, the florentine bars you gave me on Friday were great, I finished the last one as I rolled into Brisbane.

If we can resolve all the communication issues we can move on to other ways of increasing the number of runs everyone gets, which is all I've ever tried to do. As I previously mentioned, we have the run time down to an average of around five minutes. There's not much left in that. So how can we get more out of four and a half days a year? I'll open another can of worms by suggesting that we consider some of these ideas:

Scrape both tracks double wide so that if the surface breaks up or goes soft later in the week we can just shift sideways and maybe finish the week without anything more difficult. I know that means more tractor time for Andy, maybe he could train a couple of helpers. We could also consider reinstating the GPS track as a THIRD track. This could be used by newcomers for their first few runs and for short course competitors for tuning and testing changes before waiting for a run on the timed courses. Any runs done on the third track means a spot for someone else on the other tracks. It wouldn't need to be accurately surveyed if it ran parallel to either of the other tracks and could share a return road with the short track. Nor would we need to buy any more timing gear, just a starter and an observer. Competitors with low speed vehicles could switch to the timed short course whenever they decided they wanted an official speed.

The lunch break annoys me, I know the timers use it to catch up, maybe we should also use the time for a full course all track walk looking for bits that have fallen off vehicles. Get EVERYONE driven out there to walk a mile in groups of about a dozen. We did it in 2013 when a car dropped a rod. We found heaps of stuff, not just the rod, bits of piston and rings.

Comments please

Dave

Good points Dave.
I looked over my records from a few years back when we ran the old wired timing system and the best average over the whole week was 12 minutes per run.
Best runs in a day was 116 when we had ideal conditions and no equipment failures.
I think that we got the first run away by 8:00 AM and continued non stop right through till about 6:00 PM and this equates to just over 5 minutes per run as you have mentioned.
You only need one or two hiccups whether they be equipment,weather or incident/accident related to chuck everything out of whack!

Dave

Probably not a good idea to consider partially using a track or flopping a track until investigation occurred. A spin out could destroy markings or add to them. Best to shut that track down.

Spoke to your brother today. We're all getting together in just over a week to review improvements that can be made.

Regards
Lynchy