Sterling is my favorite starter!! And he makes constructive suggestions
below.
Katie (sneaking in Ralphie's mailbox because I'm too lazy to open mine)
At 09:57 PM 1/31/01 -0800, Sterling McLane wrote:
>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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