List -
Some ramblings on the VTR Nationals (Background - I attended in '94 & '95,
and, as a member of the ATA, did LOTS of work on and attended the '96 National)
1. VTR CAN NOT and SHOULD NOT allow cars that are not registered for the full
event into the car show. I'm not a concours guy, but I'd be a bit miffed if
I'd spent the weekend enjoying my car and have some local yokel stroll in on
Saturday and take first place. I tried, as a committee person for the '96
Nationals, to get the requirements for the car show INCREASED to AT LEAST 2
driving events (meaning an owner couldn't just roll the car out of the
trailer on Wednesday, run the 2 MPH funkhana, and then put the car back in
the trailer 'till Saturday morning).
2. Driven class - a great idea, but almost completely unmanageable. This would
require records to be kept, probably at both the Regional and National level
to determine how many miles a car has traveled since the last event, etc. I
believe the Jaguar Touring Club does something like this - owners of the
'Trailer Queens' simply hook up a drill to their speedo cable the night be-
fore the concours and bump it to the proper (minimal) mileage. This would
also give an unfair advantage to the local club - none of their folks would
be trailering their cars. And how do you stop the wahoo who trailers his
car to within 50 mile of the event, rolls it off the trailer, and shows up
driving it? (don't laugh - I heard a guy got the "Longest Distance Driven
Award" at a National event (not VTR) after having done just this.)
3. Racing at the Nationals - GREAT IDEA. We in the ATA tried to get Lime Rock
park for a day for the '96 Nationals. One problem was that we had to plan
our dates LOOOOONG before Skip Barber had to plan his. When his schedule
came out, the date we were looking for was booked by a race school. The
best laid plans... Rockford (in '95) had their autocross at a race track -
the best of both worlds (and it was a hell of a lot of fun!).
4. Location - While going to the suburbs is nice, there often are not proper
hotel accomodations outside of the major cities for the numbers of people
we're talking about (although if the number of participants continues to de-
crease, this will no longer be a problem :-( ). Having multiple hotels and
events spread out over a large geographic area has presented problems in the
past.
The problem seems to be that while many (MOST?) of us want to both DRIVE and
SHOW our cars (right, Jim Holewka?), there are others who have NO INTEREST in
one or the other. There must be some middle ground.
Dennis
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