I have decided not to do any NASA racing in 2009.  Last year I wanted to do it to spend more time at Infineon and less time at Thunderhill, but although I had a good time at the NASA season opener, the structure of the event left me a little cold, and I discovered that I just enjoy the SCCA races too much.

The quick summary of my issues with NASA were: A) not enough workers, especially around tech and grid; B) racers seemed to be 2nd-class citizens to the HPDE crowed; C) not enough track time.   The first issue was pretty serious — anyone can just jump out there on the track with the racers, since no one checks anything.  Even on the official results from some of the sessions just say, “Who are you?” for some of the cars, because … the officials didn’t know who was in some of the cars.

And the last issue is pretty serious too.  The schedule APPEARS to give a decent amount of track time, but since there is no time allocated between groups, some of the allocated time goes to just simply getting some cars off the track and geting other cars onto the track.  Every session is at least 5 minutes shorter than advertised, at least as far as quality track time is concerned.

Anyway, I was looking at the schedule for the 2009 NASA season opener, and it’s really screwy!  I call your attention to group A (that’s the group I’d be racing in.)

First session Saturday, 8:05: a “20-minute” warmup for ALL of the racers except Formula Mazda. That’s four groups at once, A, B, C, and E.   That’s going to just be a parade with that many cars.  Second session: “20 minute” combined qualifying with 2 race groups, A and B.  Still a lot of cars.  Then the same pair of groups races together later in the day.  Okay, so not that bad, we’ll just consider groups A and B as one bigger group and live with it.

But then Sunday, it gets really goofy.  At 8:05 AM the same 4 race groups are on track together for “20 minutes”, except that 3 of them are warming up, but one of them, group B, is RACING at the same time?  How the heck does THAT work?  Warmup means you drive around and get the car “warmed up,” brakes bedded in, etc.  RACING is RACING.  You can’t have some cars racing and some cars warming up.  Count me out.  I’m just glad I’m not in group B with that arrangement.

Then the next session … group A and group B combined again, but this time, group A is qualifying and group B is racing … again, two different activities at the same time, that’s just nonsense.

And then, finally, late in the day on Sunday, group A actually gets to race all by itself.

Yes, it’s true, at an SCCA weekend we wouldn’t have 6 sessions.  We’d have between 3 and 5, depending on the weekend.  But they are long sessions, we’re not combined with other groups, and we’re DEFINITELY not told to share the track with other groups who are trying to do something different than we are doing.  I just can’t imagine what’s going on over there at NASA headquarters, or why anyone would want to race with this group when the SCCA puts on high-quality events, for hundreds of racers, that have a structure that actually makes sense.

This entry was posted on Monday, January 26th, 2009 at 12:57 pm and is filed under NASA, SCCA.You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.