As the reviled starter for the third run group I have a few of suggestions
to add to those floated earlier today:
1) For the karts - how about if you come out of the grid in roughly
decreasing order of speed potential? It's great to have the junior kart
program, but the speed differential between the fastest adult driver and the
slowest first-time junior driver make it tough to guess the appropriate
overlap time. If the karts run in decreasing order of speed then the
starter can use the same overlap point and the interval will be OK.
2) For karts - queue up for the starting line - don't swarm around back
there. If you stall and can't immediately get restarted, go to the back of
the queue.
3) For cars - Lets encourage people who compete regularly to get in
compliance with the rule book for numbers and class letters. I have been
starting the same cars with white on silver or white of light yellow for
years, and even though they are different colors they are not contrasting
colors. From some angles those numbers will just plain disappear.
4) For cars, when we have instances where we don't have temporary numbers to
hand out - let the card sorter do a sanity check on the numbers before we
start running the group. Given the circumstances I guess we couldn't do
much about the color of the masking tape, but on Sunday we had a quite a few
cars with some combination of 1's and 7's made out of masking tape with no
class indicated. Ferinstance, in the third run group I had the number 117
yellow Lotus without class letters - D-Mod or OSP or AP? followed by the
number 117 yellow Honda S2000 without class numbers -OSP or A-Stock running
out of group? At least the S2000 had silver duct-tape numbers :-)
5) If we have to rely on the radio to inform the timing crew of who is
coming to the line, give that responsibility to the Grid Czar - the Starter
is supposed to be watching how the cars on course are doing (and in the case
of venues like Oakland - for intrusions by stray vans, bicycles,
pedestrians, etc.) to ensure that it is safe to start the next car.
6) Realize that when the speakers are facing away from the starting line,
the Starter is facing away from the motorhome, and the karts are staging for
starts, that the Starter cannot hear anything said over the PA.
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