THE LAKE WITH NO NAME

[gazzas landy]

Oh well i won`t bother ringing tomorrow ,i`ll keep searching. cheers F.G.

[David Leikvold]

Gaz, don't ever let me discourage you! Keep looking, if your first attempt doesn't get up you might find something else. As Winston Churchill liked to say, "Never surrender".

I love the idea of finding a place to race where we are welcomed and can provide some new entertainment for the locals. The opportunity to run on a sealed surface from time to time is not to be sneezed at either. It could be the start of a much bigger and better LSR scene in Australia. We currently don't have a Texas Mile or an ECTA equivalent or even an El Mirage. If you want to tell us, where was your town and how long was the strip?

Now that I look back at Charleville again, the airport there has 1800m of tar seal and a dirt runoff at the south east end of another 600m. Trouble is, QANTAS flies into there regularly which means CASA would be able to stop us using the strip if they wanted to. Just looking now at airstrips in the towns on the Warrego Highway closer to Brisbane where commercial flights aren't as likely. Dalby and Chinchilla are out, they're both too short. Miles doesn't have an airstrip that I could see, Roma has a nice strip that is about a mile long but also has QANTAS Link flights. Lucky last is Mitchell which has a 1500m strip with some runoff. That's still too short to be worth the drive. The thing I can't help noticing is the huge number of roads out there that are dead straight for miles and miles. Trouble is, most of them are the only road. I'll keep looking.

Cheers
Dave

[gazzas landy]

David i`m not discouraged,the towns are Isisford and Stonehenge,they are a fair haul your right but it was worth a go.Best place to get info is ring the local pubs,they know what`s going around the place or they know of someone who dose,take`s me back to me pigging days. Cheers F.G.

[David Leikvold]

I think the rural airstrip idea will never be a goer because every one I've checked is somewhere between 1200m and 1600m, which makes sense because they're only being used by light aircraft. Not all of them are even tar sealed. By comparison Brisbane Airport's main runway is a total of 6km long, even the GA runway is 2km. Shame we'll never get on there! I can't realistically expect the public road idea to get up either. As we aren't CAMS or AASA affiliated we aren't good risks for public liability insurance so that effectively means we have no chance. If we ever intended to run meetings of any kind away from Lake Gairdner we (probably the QTA) would need to affiliate with either of them and access their established insurance coverage at reasonable rates (they use the same insurer). I know that affiliation brings with it rules and regulations and fees that we currently don't have but we also don't have ANY racing other than Speedweek so our "independence" comes at quite a cost. The other potential advantage is we then have access to non-competing meeting officials, scrutineers, flaggies, ambulances and fire and rescue crews. This would mean it would be MUCH easier to run a weekend race meeting and if we can put on a good show, the potential for regular motorsport sponsors to help defray the cost of those meetings. That's not to be sneezed at.

So what might constitute "a good show"? If it was a CAMS or AASA event on a bitumen surface within a few hours of Brisbane we could invite and reasonably expect a lot of circuit racers to turn up just to see how fast their cars were flat out. I see no reason not to allow circuit race cars with a log book to race as is, there's no need to modify them to suit SCTA rules, they aren't that different. Let's assume for the sake of argument that the fastest cars would be the 6 litre sports sedans, which would probably run around 180mph. A serious Formula Libre might also be a weapon. If we had a few of our faster cars there that could exceed 200mph we would have a good show, especially the second time around once the serious circuit racers started gearing up for higher top speeds. We could have a competition for FTD, salt vs circuit. I'll bet we'd get a few people building 200+mph salt/bitumen cars to SCTA rules so they could join us at Speedweek. And that's not to be sneezed at either.

Cheers
Dave

[Stayt`ie]

Was talking to Luckie on the weekend, and asked him about that lake, he couldn`t remember it, however he was saying that there are a lot of dry lakes around, and particularly west of Bourke. He was telling me that after rain thay pack down hard and the surface is excellent to ride on , but given sun and wind thay quickly turn to dust and after a period of time can be covered in six inches of bulldust .

[ROSS BROWN]

Tell ya what Stayt'ie
Lake Buchanan looks to be the pick of them on a " good day"

How bads that road for dragging a thirty foot trailer up it ...?

..Ross.

[KeithTurk]

El Mirage and Muroc Dry Lakes are both radically different as well..... I'm not a soil expert... I just know it is a horrible place to race...

And i'll never race there again..... ( until next time of course... cause it's what we do.. )

If you find some road way.... make sure the shoulders don't have irrigation of any kind..... cause if you go off you want a fighting chance of just riding along until you coast to a stop....

[Stayt`ie]

Yeah Brownie, given a good spell of dry weather and at the end of winter, September, Buchanan is good to go ,,,, "most" of the road in is 100kph dirt, well maintained,,, the only problem is getting onto the lake itself, there is an access "sand" track at the southern end ( wet end, lake falls 11 inches north to south ),, i have found another access point, but its the small "beach" crossing that presents a challenge,,, have some photos both on and from the air, will post them here, as soon as work gives me a price on a redundant scanner ,,,,

[Zaltrennwagen]

I watched the TV show about Bob Jane. I wonder if he would allow speed trials in the Thunder dome?
The man needs an excuse to smile again.


Europe has seen speed trials done in the same type of track. Such as this,the Former Monza banking .

[ROSS BROWN]

Slipping slightly off subject here......

Is that the second or third one thats bit him

Can't remember if its Ford or Holden that have a huge private test track like this VW one , banked corners and giant straights
About ten thousand to many trees for my liking Zalt......
borrowed this from the BBC (Quite entertaining, sounds sweet as .....going through the turn)


Click here to learn how to add YouTube Videos to your phpBB forum

[OLDtimer]

He would only screw it up, just like drag racing ! Pete. DLRA #6.

[Cookey]

This forum is starting to degenerate into mindless poop once again

[SPOOK]

Good point Cookey, lets keep the personal stuff out of it.