--- Keith Turk <kturk@ala.net> wrote:
I saw a neat shade canopy at an SCCA event last
weekend. The guy had removable poles on the four
corners of his trailer. In the morning he pitted
on one side of the trailer and was in the shade,
at noon he had a lunch setup on the trailer
itself, and in the afternoon he moved his race
car to the shade on the other side of the
trailer. It would take one monster wind to blow
his canopy away since it was firmly attached to
the trailer, and he didn't have to mess with
ropes and pins in the ground or weights. He just
dropped the poles in the sockets on the traier
and tightened set screws.
If anybody tries to go racing without a
checklist, they should really re-think how they
do things. Both my wife and I are retired from
full careers on an air force flight-line, and we
probably overdo the checklist thing, but it has
saved my butt more than once. We have a
pre-load/travel checklist, and unload checklist,
a pre-race checklist, and a post-run checklist.
We go through every item on the vehicle after
every race run. I road-raced motorcycles for a
long time, and she found a loose nut after a
morning Daytona race that could well have costed
me my life had I run the afternoon with the nut
loose and lost it on the banking or
straight-away.
Ironically, and almost humorously, at that same
race, a friend of mine drove 400 miles to the
race only to open his enclosed trailer the
morning of tech inspection to find that his race
bike was still back in Pensacola. He used to
tease us about all our plastic covered
checklists, but I noticed that at the next race,
he too had some plastic covered checklists and a
grease pencil. Although it would be harder to
forget a race car than a race bike, that
checklist will certainly insure that you don't
forget other often left behind things like
driving shoes, helmets, competition licenses,
certain tools, vehicle log, credit cards and
cash, etc.
Dick J
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