2007 VTR South Central Region Trials
A note about the autocross from Don Carter:
I suppose a million apologies cannot make-up for what happened when the track was closing around us without our finishing our runs.
The obvious mistakes were in my not planning the overall time it would take for the everyone to run the event. A few course workers didn’t get to run it at all. That’s a crime! Unintentional maybe, but still a crime.
After “reprocessing” the runs of Group A and counting only first runs, (to match and be more fair to Group B who only had one run), a uniform adjustment of three seconds was added to all DNF (Did Not Finish) runs. Right or wrong this is what was done. Some cone take outs were more serious than others but most were simple, so this average of three second penalty was used throughout the first run DNF’s to be consistent. Recording of the “times” and therefore with the award presentation itself is where I made yet another mistake. The first mistake in the limited track time can’t be fixed, but the following is how I propose to fix the second one.
We now have (and should always have had) a Modified GT6 class. There were two in this class and because I went by names instead of cars, I put Eric Schumann’s white modified GT6 in the TR6 or M4 class because Eric usually drives his TR6. MGT is the Modified GT6 class. Since I thought that there was only one car in this class I moved it to the M4 class just as VTR rules instructs. I simply didn’t catch this when I totaled the scores. I will send the GT6 owners their 1st Place and 2nd place trophies with my apologies. Both these GT6 owners are such nice people that they didn’t even bring this to my attention, and I’m pretty sure they thought an old autocrosser was too tired to deal with any changes.
So, Richard Ceraldi of the Hill Country Triumph Club in Austin, and Eric Schumann of our very own Texas Triumph Register, please accept my sincere apologies. It is important to note that Richard Ceraldi’s time was only 1/4 of a second slower than our Fastest Time of Day winner. (Richard, I want some tires like yours so I can beat Bob Kramer.)
Thanks to Russ Seto and Jim Wortsman, the time keepers, all but two of the DNF’s were recorded. Those two that had no times for their DNF’s were the slower times anyway and we used their second run numbers with a smaller penalty.
I also want to thank the course workers who stood hours out there in the sun so that the rest of the field could have a controlled and safe event, and in particular those course workers that didn’t get to run at all because they had to get in the back of the line in Group B to run the event and then had it called due to having to close the course.
Photos this page by Clay Thompson
