by Brian Shorey
AONE Director and Convention Chairman

When you are planning to host a convention, just attending one takes on a completely different light. I found myself making mental notes all the time. At the registration desk the following morning, part of me was mentally apologizing to the folks working the desk for not pre-registering, while the other part of me was cursing the folks at the desk for not being there! It’s a California thing—8:00 in California really means some time between 8:00 and, say, 8:20 or so…

I pretty much signed up for everything I could sign up for—lunchtime laps at the Time Trials (and later the Autocross, when I found out that roll bars were not required), the rally, barbecues, banquets, the awards luncheon after the concours…

After registration, it was off to the Time Trials. This is where I made my second mental note, and remembered an important California driving lesson: Road signs in California tend to tell you which exit you just went by. Mental note to self: When we host the convention, make sure that the directions are all in order, and clear to everyone and not just the locals. The directions to the track were pretty basic; however, I made one little mistake: I assumed that there would be a sign or something on the major highway where I should get off for the speedway. Instead, the speedway sign was at the bottom of the off ramp!

Anyway, I finally made it there, and found out that I could, in fact, enter the Autocross in the Miata, if I had a helmet. I tracked down friend Ian Lomax and his friend Kim, and traded them Miata Autocross rides in exchange for the use of their helmet. We were kind of rushed (as we didn’t actually sign up until well after lunch), so we didn’t do any real car preparation, like putting air in the tires. In spite of all that, we did pretty well—Ian actually turned in a better time than John Hoard, although, to be fair, John was driving an automatic Spider, having blown the head gasket in his GTA earlier in the day. (That was the first time that a failure prevented John from finishing a track event in 31 years of ownership.)

On Friday, I woke up early to find out the schedule for the AROC Board of Directors meeting, and what time I should show up to present our bid. At this point, I was feeling pretty good—all day during the Time Trials, people were coming up to me, wishing us luck, and offering help.

My original plan was to show up early in the afternoon to present the bid, but I decided to sit in on the entire BoD meeting to see how things were run, and to try to get a feeling as to the general mood of the Directors.

One side comment I’d like to offer: With the recent dues increase, these are not easy times for the club. If you sit in on one BoD meeting, however, you get an idea of what they’re dealing with; things are not as straightforward as they might seem. After watching our BoD in action, I feel pretty good about the members on it, and what they’re trying to do for the club.

Anyway, on to the bid! After my obligatory opening joke, I went right into the bid. [You can view and/or print our proposal as an Acrobat PDF file exactly as it was presented to the BoD by clicking here—Ed.] The BoD loved the idea of the drag races—they wanted to jump into a discussion of how it should be run right then and there. They also got a kick out of the amazing stretch Giulia Sedan limo that someone "photographed" in front of the convention center.

There were no other bidders (which helped our odds), but there was one possible thing that could have gotten in our way: The club likes to move the convention location around from year to year, alternating coasts, and, with 2003 in Florida, a second consecutive east coast bid might have been rejected. It was not to be, however—after some discussion around our dates (we had two potential weekends to choose from), the bid was accepted with a lot of enthusiasm!

I’d like to thank all of the volunteers who put so much effort into putting this bid together. Right now, we have over 25 people on our convention

list, and many worked long and hard to identify venues and hammer out details. At this year’s convention, people kept telling me how crazy I was and how much work ours is going to be, but with the group of people we have working on it already and the level of enthusiasm they’ve shown so far, I’m not worried in the least. Way to go, team!

The Southern Cal team had a lot of evening activities planned, and the directions to each and every one of them were, well, just wrong. Given that I was having trouble following even the most basic directions, and coupled with my history of having never actually completed a rally [Now maybe we’re getting to the crux of the problem—Ed.], things weren’t looking good for the following day.

I decided to place a personal ad on the bulletin board. It kind of read like this:

I heard back from a couple of people, the first being a guy named Keith Kelly, from Oklahoma. Once Russ Neely assured me that I wouldn’t find myself lying face-down in a ditch at the side of the road, I decided to go with Keith. I found out afterward that Keith is actually pretty good at these things, having won two or three of the last few national rallies. Keith and I had a blast running the rally! Half of the time, we ran it in stealth mode—we’d see an Alfa approach from behind and we’d take a wrong turn, or deliberately miss a turn, or just stop at a sign, jump out, and start taking notes.

In the end, there were a few teams that got a perfect score (in spite of our antics), but we ended up winning based on the best card hand (we drew a card at each checkpoint).

On Saturday evening was the grand banquet. Mental note to self: Start ours a little earlier and get the guest speaker on before 10:45PM. In spite of the late hour, it was a lot of fun. I sat next to an AONE member who now lives in Calgary (Hello, Brian and Diana Pleet!). They had driven 2400 miles from Calgary, and were fretting over how the scoring was done at the concours, but the next day went on to win first in class in their Spider— nice job!

We wrapped up the convention on Sunday at the concours. There were a couple of wild cars there, most notably an 8C2600 Monza, but otherwise I was expecting a lot more from a concours in this area of the country. I spent the morning strolling around, meeting up with old friends (and putting some faces to old Alfa Digest friends), and snapping pictures, some of which appear on these pages.

After the concours, I was supposed to caravan with a couple of 164s up to the Bay Area, but after futzing around for over an hour waiting for one of them to pack his luggage, and then failing to prod them into exceeding speeds of 65 mph on the highway, I took off in the trusty Miata, eventually checking into my hotel in Milpitas approximately three hours before they arrived in town. The traffic was brutal…