The NASA National Championships are taking place this weekend at Mid-Ohio.

I’ve just been looking at today’s results, and they prove my point that I made back in March about the way NASA runs the race schedules.

If you look at the actual schedule, it looks like today’s qualifying races are 20 minutes long.  However, if you look at the results, you can see that the checkered flag was thrown on most these races less than 10 minutes after the green.  10 minute races?  Come on, people!  It’s hardly even worth hitting the track.  It was raining today, so cars were a little slower than normal, but these qualifying races were only 4 laps long.

The actual National Championship races on Sunday are scheduled for 40 minutes, which probably means that they’ll be closer to 30 minutes in actual length. maybe 13 laps.  That, at least, is pretty much a real sprint race, although in my opinion a National Championship race should be a little longer.  When the SCCA held its National Championship Runoffs at Mid-Ohio, the races were each 20 laps.

Again, anyone who compares NASA schedules to SCCA and determines that NASA gives you more race time needs to really take a harder look.  It might still be true in some cases, but it’s not as rosy as a first glance makes it appear.  I think NASA tries to cram too much into each day, even at their premier race-only weekend.

EDIT: The event is over. With better weather, the 40-minute races did turn out to be more laps than I expected … between 15 and 19 laps, ranging from less than 29 minutes to over 32 minutes. But none of this takes away from the level of competition at the event, congratulations to all of the winners! Next year’s NASA Championships will be closer to home, at Miller Motorsports Park in Utah, we’ll see how that one goes!

This entry was posted on Friday, September 12th, 2008 at 5:29 pm and is filed under NASA.You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.