Mike King wrote:
> I wasn't one of the people that condemned the event. I actually had
> a good
> time.
You should have, winning $350 and a set of Toyo tires.
>I just think it all could have been much better scheduled and
> planned
> out beforehand.
Are you volunteering to help us do the planning next year?
>But hey, it happens. BTW, hundreds of hours? What
> are you
> guys building up there?
>
I didn't make that number up. Rocky Entriken has run Mirrorkhana in
Kansas with this general format for 25 years. We communicated back and
forth for several months getting ideas from him. Then we developed, from
scratch, the staging area perpendicular to the course. Rocky just lines
up the cars on course at the start/finish lines (like we did for the
humongo setbacks required with FM running against a Stock car). But they
don't use any kind of handicapping in Mirrorkhana. We wanted to do this
so we could speed up the event. Staging cars on the course takes a lot of
time. By having the next match pre-staged saved a lot of time. Anyway,
the staging feature must be set up exactly right or one side has a
distance advantage. Tom Simon and I spent half the day on Friday
measuring and remeasuring that feature to make sure it was right. And
BTW, despite much conjecture about which lane was quicker it turned out
to be about even when you analyze the final results. I heard lots of
conjecture from the competitors about the "best" lane but about half
liked one and half liked the other.
Also, we spent several meetings hammering out the details of how to
develop the handicapped setbacks. Tom Simon is an engineer and I have no
idea how much time he spent working on this problem, but he developed the
spreadsheet that allows us to just plug in the course length and all the
setbacks get figured. On top of that were many more discussions, phone
calls and emails to fine tune the handicaps.
It's real easy to "Monday morning quarterback" and point out the deficits
in someone else's efforts putting together essentially a whole new type
of event. The rest of the competitors seemed to appreciate the newness of
the concept and cut us a little slack for our first time efforts.
Frankly, I'm thrilled with how well it came off considering how short
staffed we were. We tried to pre-plan for all the possible glitches that
could come up but you can never foresee every challenge until you face
the real thing.
One thing we didn't plan for was racer ego and creativity of methods to
try to get an advantage over a competitor at the start line. Next year
we'll TELL the drivers when the start sequence is happening instead of
asking if they are ready. You guys are at the start line while the other
cars are finishing their match. Your helmet is on, your seatbelts are
buckled, you are just waiting. We had several instances of intentionally
stalling at the line to get the jump on competitors, that won't happen
next year.
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