Regional #5 Administrative

[jcox07]

Driving from cone to cone and not looking far enough ahead may also be a problem. It sounds like you are looking for pointer cones from one cone to the next. Find the cone and then start looking ahead for the next turn before you get to the one that you are about to get to. Continue this till the course is done. You are driving faster than your brain can tell you where to go to next. Slow down the first couple of runs till you have a good idea of the course.

[ke0ki2k]

this thread is teh sux

[steverife]

Dang Chris I swear you have that stored somewhere where you can pull that vidoe ot and any given moment.
Seriously I will be honest you can ask Robert Carpenter how I used to overanalyze everything. Even how much throttle should I apply at this spot. Finally Robert gave me one of his reality pep talks and told me to (PG version get in the car and just drive) and I picked up a lot of time! Bottom line my best advise is to just walk and run the course in your head. If you focus on the electronics its time you are losing on doing a good ole fashined course walk. The electronics will not drive the car. It takes time and you will get it! I seriously just clicks after a few times.

Everybody thinks that everybody else's brain works just like theirs. They don't. I've never been able to run a course in my head no matter how many times I walk it or even after I've driven it. It's buried in there somewhere, but I can't play it like a movie. And if I don't get some sort of reinforcement, it's definitely not going to be there four hours later. Also, just because something has never helped you (being inclusive of all the responders), doesn't mean it won't help me and conversely. I'm going to try video or pictures and see if that helps.

I agree that everyone's mind works differently.

I don't think you have to memorize courses, but you better learn to look ahead. ...and to be able to effectively look ahead, you need learn what to look for and to know the general direction to look, which means learning the shape of the course.

[Wheelman_13]

Well, I'm out of reasonable ideas, so on to the absurd:

• Bribe someone (hopefully not too heavy) to ride with you and yell out pace notes.
• Take up road racing: the track never moves, you have days/weeks/years to remember where it goes, and the only things you have to remember are any blind crests. Mind that T10 at VIR!
• Consult with a psychologist regarding possible mnemonic devices you could try in order to memorize and replay visual data in a short time frame.
• Play video games. They are proven to increase your ability to process visual data....if not many other benefits.

I mean we're all here to help, but if nothing we suggest is going to stick or work for you, I dunno what to tell you.

[John Brown]

Yellow caution or crime scene banner lining the course has not been addressed yet.. has it?

[jcox07]

Hey, I can get all kinds of crime scene tape..... Or how about bread crumbs, it worked for hans.... oh no it didn't for them two, but hey we have all tried.lol

[01badz28]

https://www.onstar.com/web/portal/home

"Hello, this is Onstar, how may I help you?"

"Please help me, I missed the apex at the first turn, overshot the last brake zone, and I'm behind in the slalom."

"Put both feet in and slowly pull through the finish. Your run is f@&%d."

[dewittpayne]

Simply put, you should not need pointer cones. Pointer cones are necessary during your course walk, but if you are driving on course at speed looking for pointers to remind you which way to go, you have failed at your course walk....and that circles us back to your course walk and preparation.

Reductio ad absurdum: You shouldn't need cones at all.

I don't buy that. As I have said many times before, I won't have a picture of the course in my head no matter how many times I walk it. I rely on visual cues. I get lost when the visual cues conflict or are difficult to locate. Seeing the visual cues at speed is different than seeing them while walking the course. Maybe that will get better with more experience, but I doubt it. I was able to assemble what I think is a clean run by cutting and pasting video from my last two runs, the start and finish from my third run and the middle part from my second run. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FnOvD8A6wzM And yes, that means I got lost in the middle part in my third run even though I had done it correctly on my second run.

A friend of mine, Tom Bolick, drove at the Chimney Rock Hillclimb in a Mini and then in a Formula Ford for years. That course didn't change. But he still needed to see the course every year. What he found that worked best was to take a video in a passenger car and watch it many times at a fast forward rate that approximated his speed up the course. He was one of the fastest drivers on the course in a car with a small fraction of the power that Mike Green and John Finger,say, had in their rotary powered specials.

Going back to the first post in the thread: I wasn't the only one having problems finding the course. There were four other drivers who got no time because all of their runs were DNF's, and I'm not including the kart driver with mechanical problems. There were a lot of DNF's period. If you insist that there were no problems with the course layout, you're hip deep in a famous river in Africa. Danny Pressley, the Roush driver had a clean first run and DNF'd the next two. I did the same thing at event #4, and even though I put in two more clean runs, the first run was the fastest.

There were novices out there who apparently didn't even know that when there was a line of widely spaced cones, you were supposed to take them on alternate sides, i.e. slalom. Most of the novice walks I've been on at events, as opposed to schools, talk about car placement and driving lines. A novice may not even know the language of course layout, like the meaning of pointer cones and gates, much less how to pick out and look for the key cones. Odds on, they don't even know the right questions to ask.

[dewittpayne]

Driving from cone to cone and not looking far enough ahead may also be a problem. It sounds like you are looking for pointer cones from one cone to the next. Find the cone and then start looking ahead for the next turn before you get to the one that you are about to get to. Continue this till the course is done. You are driving faster than your brain can tell you where to go to next. Slow down the first couple of runs till you have a good idea of the course.

I really wasn't going that fast. I just couldn't always pick out the right marks from the cone sea and focused on the wrong ones instead.

[dewittpayne]

Yellow caution or crime scene banner lining the course has not been addressed yet.. has it?

You do know that other regions often use powdered chalk line spreaders to mark courses, don't you?

[oldmuscle69]

Thanks.

[RxCritical]

As a impartial 3rd party observer I believe this thread has run it's course.

[John Brown]

Yellow caution or crime scene banner lining the course has not been addressed yet.. has it?

You do know that other regions often use powdered chalk line spreaders to mark courses, don't you?

good point... but you do know that as for myself and Id say 100% of any fast driver... we NEVER even se that chaulk on the pavement..
NEVER. EVER.

Sir, Im gonna go out on a limb here..as I don't personally know you.. but it seems that your not very absorbant to the unbelievable wealth of knowledge that's been handed to you on this thread... from some of the fastest and most respected drivers in the sport. If you..or myself even think that any course will be set up to be a perfect blend of every element and visual for us... we are sadly mistaken. The courses are not set up to be visual to everybody on the planet..nor will they ever be..its up to the driver to ADAPT to what is thrown their way.
And as far as the others that DNF that day..I know that the Rosses are very new..and it may have been Bobs very first event.
I suggest you become more open minded to a region of knowledge..and stop falling back on.. "its the courses fault"

Next event Id be more than happy to assist you !!

[integra55]

Yellow caution or crime scene banner lining the course has not been addressed yet.. has it?

You do know that other regions often use powdered chalk line spreaders to mark courses, don't you?

DeWitt, the other regions that line their courses don't use figure 8, criss-cross, and multiple laps around a particular lamp pole like we do ... while lots of people think lining the course is a good idea ... (they do it at the Nationals) it would REALLY cause confusion if we tried it at Pilli ... you think you have problems now ......

with all the suggestions put forth so far, I'm not sure what anyone can do to help at this point .. nothing anyone says seems to be something that you think would help ...

lining the course won't work at this site, walking between run groups won't happen .... electronic gizmos ... don't see how they'll help in the moment ... where else should we look for solutions ?

[EliseAutoXr]

As a impartial 3rd party observer I believe this thread has run it's course.

haha, I agree but I think I might have something to add ... all though to be honest it probably has already been suggested, if so please ignore. For the record, I pay zero attention to pointers when running. After walking I do run the course in my head over and over (like when waiting on drivers meeting, strolling off to the bathrooms, etc). But I also break the course down into sections and I only think about one section at a time while running (and in my head). Instead of 24 left/right transistions, etc I look the entire course as just 4 or 5 sections. Then after the run I think about what I could do in each section to go a bit fast (or consider what did NOT work in the last run). Hope this helps.