Cal Club Autocross Forums

That was a great practice. I would have come just for the BBQ. Great job guys.

Good job everyone. I had a lot of fun.

But please leave the wind machine turned off for tomorrow.......

We had fun doing the event and hope everyone enjoyed themselves. We all felt bad about the shortage of workers on course. A special thanks to all who volunteered when the call went out for help. Those of you that endured did a tremendous job in difficult circumstances. The thought was to work once and not have to work the rest of the day, but we may have to rethink this scenario. Your comments, both good and bad, would be appreciated.

Get more people in! Lesser runs but everybody gets to practice. And you will have more people working! Or just have practice for your members only...

Ira Cruz wrote:Get more people in! Lesser runs but everybody gets to practice. And you will have more people working! Or just have practice for your members only...

+1

It was along course requiring more worker positions. But we all like long courses.

We all like more runs.

We (non-CASOC members) appreciate the event being open, specially for those of us needing seat time before the ProSolo.

One solution is to have few run groups. It means more waiting in lines, but more workers per group. Step 1 is determine how many course workers you need. 20? And then add in trailer and assorted other work assignments. 25? If you have anything less than 100 entrants and 5 groups or more... the math says there is a problem.

We (Andrea and I) ended up working extra out there to try to help out. A long afternoon. But them we were no longer driving since the car was broken.

In any case, thanks CASOC. I enjoyed the course and the food, specially that amazing chili.

thanks, both days were fun! I got quite the workout - I think I actually got a bit healthier this weekend

also, a very big thank you for sending out the cars slower than normal - didn't fully alleviate the problem but made it much easier most of the time to get to cones.

I'm still a fan of work once, run all day; for this particular practice course design, it may have worked better w/ 4 groups of 2 hours each - a little longer work session but much easier work overall + it may have still balanced out w/ # of runs since we would be able to send out cars a bit quicker.

Randy Chase wrote:One solution is to have few{er} run groups. It means more waiting in lines, but more workers per group.

That would make for longer work sessions too though.

Jay W

Some random pics from Sunday...





http://s176.photobucket.com/albums/w173 ... mpetition/

Jayson Woodruff wrote:

Randy Chase wrote:One solution is to have few{er} run groups. It means more waiting in lines, but more workers per group.

That would make for longer work sessions too though.

Jay W

Agreed. With the people complaining of how long those work sessions were, I can't imagine 4 core work groups and standing in place that long. Seems like the last E-board event we ran had a good flow of worker/runners. 4 core groups, with individual schedules (run/rest/work). That seems to be a good format so far...albeit the matrix they had taped to the registration desk made it harder to understand. :mrt:

Just wanna put in my .02 and say I hope people who had car trouble get things fixed without too much grief, and hats off to Tom Berry for the course. I haven't run a course that technical in quite a while so as frustrating as it was, it was very humbling and thats a good thing. Always good to have your mettle tested under fire...the course would really draw you in to get greedy and you had to be more patient with it which will only make me faster through the year.

Thanks to my fellow teammates in CASOC for such a good event! Looking forward to our next one!

In hind sight could we have had and should we have had 6 run groups?

Mako Koiwai wrote:In hind sight could we have had and should we have had 6 run groups?

Probably. Hindsight is 20/20 after all.

George Schilling wrote:

Mako Koiwai wrote:In hind sight could we have had and should we have had 6 run groups?

Probably. Hindsight is 20/20 after all.

I wasn't at the event on Sunday but...

Nationals runs 300 people through an event with a 5 run group setup. Why are we having trouble with it? And on a cone intensive course like this weekend where I heard that the stations were struggling to keep up with cone counts do you really want to thin out your workers?

The results show 244 entries with times but 31 of those are X-runs so really you have just over 200 people in the worker pool. and then take out event officials, morning gate workers, tech workers, registration workers, people working in the timing motorhome, etc... Before you answer the 5 groups vs. 6 groups, figure out if you would have had enough course workers to keep the cones up if there had been less people out on course.

again, I wasn't there (unfortunatly) but i'm just sayin...

FYI. I worked radio in Section 4, at the end of course.
Including myself, I had 5 workers.
Of which, was just enough to keep up. One less and it would have been chaos.


And, BIG thanks to CASOC for the great weekend.
A challenging technical course to test our wits and our cars.
Good food at the BBQ
Good competition.

I really liked the addition in the reg. line of having a "fast track" If you were pre-registered and pre-paid. I walked up and I was told to go right to the worker line!
Adrian had a printout of the registration list and said I was already checked in, nice touch.

The chiefs did an amazing job too. Thanks to all.

Christine Berry wrote:

George Schilling wrote:

Mako Koiwai wrote:In hind sight could we have had and should we have had 6 run groups?

Probably. Hindsight is 20/20 after all.

I wasn't at the event on Sunday but...

Nationals runs 300 people through an event with a 5 run group setup. Why are we having trouble with it? And on a cone intensive course like this weekend where I heard that the stations were struggling to keep up with cone counts do you really want to thin out your workers?

The results show 244 entries with times but 31 of those are X-runs so really you have just over 200 people in the worker pool. and then take out event officials, morning gate workers, tech workers, registration workers, people working in the timing motorhome, etc... Before you answer the 5 groups vs. 6 groups, figure out if you would have had enough course workers to keep the cones up if there had been less people out on course.

again, I wasn't there (unfortunatly) but i'm just sayin...

The biggest "problem" is our local segregation of morning and afternoon groups for run/work. National events don't have that seperation. You are expected to be there all day. Because of that, when we get a lot of visitors, like every time we run at El Toro, most want to be done by lunchtime so they pick a class that runs in the morning. Even if we had done 6 groups yesterday, we almost would have needed a 4 in the morning, 2 in the afternoon split to have "even" run/work groups.

start implementing Run morning/ work afternoon

Curt Luther wrote:

Christine Berry wrote: The biggest "problem" is our local segregation of morning and afternoon groups for run/work. National events don't have that separation. You are expected to be there all day. Because of that, when we get a lot of visitors, like every time we run at El Toro, most want to be done by lunchtime so they pick a class that runs in the morning. Even if we had done 6 groups yesterday, we almost would have needed a 4 in the morning, 2 in the afternoon split to have "even" run/work groups.

Can't compare to Nats, run groups are decided after almost all people have registered. It would be easy to balance the groups if we required pre-registration and then closed it a couple of weeks before the event or made late registration fees so high most would not be willing to pay it.

National events are painful. Every run group seems to push 2 hours.

Just a thread note. The 'tough work' discussion was started as referance to the practice, then drifted to the championship. So the conversation about isn't exactly continous.

Jay W

I think charging $1 per cone hit during practice might help reduce the workload

Back on topic, I felt the weekend was well done despite the terrible winds on Sat and the challenges of a cone intensive course on Sun. I did like driving the course, just found it a bit more visually challenging than I care for. CASOC, as usual, maintained a high standard of excellence in event hosting.

On Sunday, station 1 was spread out across a long distance. There were plenty of runners to cover the cones, but the radio operator was so far away that we could not tell if he was watching our signals regarding cones and DNFs, or calling them in. I heard that conditions were similar for at least one other station. Does CSCC have a limited number of radios? With more radios, some of those stations could have been split up into more manageable chunks.

Anyway, thanks for a fun course and a pretty smooth event.

Regarding Sundays course. I shared with the designer my thoughts on the course based entirely on the cone counts, DNF's and the typical cause of such. While I stand by the basis of my original comment, I'm glad to see a technical course again.... it's been some time, and that definitely played it's part too.

That said I ran after I shared the comment. I had a BLAST on the course, and no cone-age We need more technical courses! Thank you course designer.

Course gave me a headache.... In a good way. I like being beat up like that. Masochistic tendencies? But it probably can't be done all the time just for event efficiency reasons. But sure nice to see once in awhile, especially right before our hardcore season starts. Thanks Tom!