Saturday morning presented us a challenge. Besides the elephant in the room, this is a track with a reputation of being tough with the added component of weather. As I drove north out of Richmond to the Dominion Raceway, I was relieved to see the weather clearing and the conditions dry. The weather was now one less concern, but the challenge was on; how to build a safe event for the club, do something new and exciting and provide everyone a good time.
We arrived and already had ideas on how to slow the group down in the trouble areas in order keep everyone safe, yet keep the speeds up. A track cross is unique to autocrosser’s because you already have the track laid out. It is not a big square parking lot with lots of options, but a ribbon of road that is set and designed for a full course run over and over again for a set period of time. This isn’t what this group historically does. We set up a large portion of the track rather than the complete track and we added a degree of control into the event to keep it safe and matching what an autocross does. That is the game.
Many of us in our racing group came up the year before and track crossed with an event Dominion put on. It was interesting and allowed us to see the place not just on YouTube, but first hand. The walls were close. Certain sections had some paving issues, bumps and such, but it was a nice place. So we signed up to try it this year… and boy was it different than what we had done in the past for the RPM event.
We stretched our start to begin about 600 feet into the front straight braking area. This gave us a great chance to use a very nice and straight part of the track to let participants open it up. This was different than other track crosses and allowed us to maximize some of the safest parts of the track. The middle of the course was just as the track lays out, no modifications, but as we approach the lower esses and finish, the speeds had to be chopped down as this is where the tricky part of the track presents itself. We put in a slowing gate right before the hard left. Another directional gate was added forcing people to the inner part of the turn and then into another four cone slalom. After this part, we allowed drivers to fully accelerate up the hill through the esses and out of the finish line. Most autocrosses run about 60 MPH, this however, was a bit faster. Most crossed the finish line around 80 MPH, a few of us hit 90- 95… in third gear. Fun stuff!
We had 37 racers, and 19 of them were non-Porsches, or other cars. Many of our buddies who have not participated in RPM, but race with us in Staunton, did make the journey. A few of them who have run the full course said it was fun and challenging even with added cone obstacles. As the day ended, we split the top six times with three Porsches in the top six. An open wheeled Miata powered tube frame car pulled fastest time of the day, but Cam Abernethy pulled a nice second with the first car with doors across the line in 72.7 seconds. Eric Huggins in his true street car came in one second behind that for third place. We had Audi’s, a Kia Stinger, a gaggle of Miatas, many 911’s, Boxsters and Caymans. We had our only Mustang, a 2017 driven very well by Matthew Welch. Although he was the only one who slipped all day, but he recovered nicely. Matthew was only .1 seconds off of my 911. He drove that tank very well. One really interesting thing that happened was our 5th place through 12th place was in the range of .3 seconds on a 76 second course. It doesn’t get much tighter than that.
Many of our friends who did not make it have already acknowledged they will attend next year. I heard only positive remarks from the competitors and the Dominion Raceway staff. Dominion was very nice to us and they were great to work with. Trust me, that is rare and hard to find when putting together events. I would love to run there again in 2020.
We will discuss improvements for next year. However, Dominion was a good option for us, no one had any safety issues and although I spent 3 hours designing two slaloms and a slowdown gate, it was time well spent to beat the Dominion Speedway reputation of at least one car in the wall!
A special thanks to Erik and Nathan Boody who design and build our timing equipment. Erik also checks my ideas for safe and common sense track layouts that people can understand. We have been driving competitively a long time (racing 26 years, running PCA autocrosses 19 years) and I wouldn’t want anyone else as a partner. Great job guys! Thanks to all those who stepped up to the challenge of this event.
