Free Fun: Host Your Own Race

We recently tried something (in the interests of science and all) that we think many of our readers and Team Winding Road members would enjoy. We hosted a race-within-a-race. It is pretty easy and costs very little (as low as $0) assuming you were already going racing on a given weekend.  But the big point is that it can be really fun.

 

Though there could be many reasons you’d want to create your own competition, the basic idea is simple. Below are a few examples.

 

 

You might run a car that normally has really low car count (1 or 2). You could decide to run a race-within-a-race to attract more cars in your class. This might also apply if you run in a class where your version or period of car is simply no longer competitive (example: we have Radical SR3 that is classed in SCCA P1, but is not a competitive car there; we could do a race-within-a-race for 1500cc Radical SR3s).

 

On the other hand, let’s say you race in a group that typically has 30 cars in it. Maybe you and some of your racing friends are usually separated on grid by a row or two (you’re usually on row 2 or 3, you have a friend who is more like a row 5 or 6 guy and another who tends to be on row 6 or 7). So normally you wouldn’t be racing head to head. Under normal circumstances it could happen that you run together, but that probably won’t be the case. By creating a race-within-a-race, you have a way to compete that won’t occur naturally on track.

 

 

Another thing you might like is to do some team racing. A lot of racers we know really like the camaraderie of a team, and by creating a race-within-a-race you can join forces with someone. This approach requires an event long enough that a driver change makes sense, of course. And, sometimes you need to be willing to give up the overall race if many of the racers will not be doing a pit stop (note that SVRA, and some others, conveniently have an “enduro” format where timed pit stops are required, so driver changes are not disadvantaged).

 

 

We recently created a race-within-a-race. We were planning to run Spec Miata in The Loooong Race held by the Midwestern Council of Sports Car Clubs at Blackhawk Farms Raceway outside of Chicago. SM cars have the nifty feature that they almost always can run in a second group (e.g. SCCA STL) though they will not be competing for the podium. So, we thought, “why not create a race-within-a-race for this second run group and invite our friends to compete for flashy hardware, honor and glory?”

 

Dave Wheeler and Dan Ibrahim

We love team racing, so our first idea (because your humble servant usually races with his son) was to create a race where fathers and sons make up teams. We are open-minded people who really want more women competing on track, so we defined “father” and “son” pretty liberally (see our example rules below).

 

We then faced the challenge of handicapping so that father-son teams of different skill levels would have a shot at winning. For father-son racing we used a handicap based on age.

 

Mitch and Danny Bender

 

One of our father-son teams runs a T4 MX-5, not a Spec Miata. Fortunately, that car runs in the same MCSCC group we were targeting so we let them in. At the last minute, we handicapped that T4 car based on lap time differences from the prior day’s racing (we could have used class lap records as an alternative).

 

We’re tired of tiny, cheap plastic trophies, so we shopped online for the biggest metal and wood trophy we could find. We decided to make it a travelling trophy, since we plan to hold this event every year (this conveniently reduces the cost/year of the trophy, too).

 

 

Then we sat down and wrote some rules. Racers, being competitive people, want to know the rules in advance so they can try to exploit them for advantage. Therefore, we recommend thinking the rules through carefully. Our rules are reprinted below as inspiration.

 

 

When it came to race time, we had 8 racers on 4 teams competing in the International Father-Son Challenge, sponsored by Advanced Autosports and Winding Road Racing. The Loooong Race runs for 50 laps or about 1 hour and 10 minutes, so each driver would be in the car for 30 minutes plus or minus a bit depending on team strategy. In the race, the winning car finished 10 seconds ahead of the second place car.

 

Tom and Tyler Brown

 

Of note, the second place car went briefly off track with five laps to go while catching the leader at 2 seconds per lap, making us think our BOP formula was pretty good (or even a blind squirrel…).

 

We had a good time, with lots of close racing, as you can see in this video: