well, we finally pulled one off! Our first autocross since the convention three years ago, and who knows how long before that!

On Father’s Day, we had 24 drivers brave the near-perfect weather to attend our "return to autocrossing" event at the Nashoba Valley Ski Area in Westford, MA. This event took us a long time to organize and prepare; we actually started work on it last year, but were unable to secure a venue. (For anybody who can help, we’re still looking for places to host more of these—contact bshorey@cisco.com if you’ve got a spot or even an idea for one!)

A lot of people did a lot of work to make this happen—the usual cast of characters, including Dave Pratt, Andy Kress, Tom Lesko, and Kevin Murphy. But special thanks go to Stephan de Pénasse, who came up with all of the loaner helmets at no cost to the club, and Kevin Redden, who did an incredible amount of legwork, and made things look easy on the day of the event.

Several of us arrived at the crack of dawn to design the course. Since the space is limited, we started with a variation of the Jaguar Club Slalom, which cleverly makes use of a smaller area by covering the ground three times in each run, with variations each time. However, since we’re not restricted by national Jaguar club rules, we were able to stretch it and flip it, and change the entry and exit points. This seems to have resulted in a nice, fun course that took 55-65 seconds (or thereabouts) to complete. It also resulted in the added benefit of being something of an IQ test, which not everybody was able to pass the first time through!

Organizationally, we were a little rusty at first, but once we got rolling things seemed to smooth out. Fortunately, we had a lot of people jump in and help, which made things a lot easier. One other interesting fact is that, when we asked how many novices we had, about two thirds of the group raised their hands! Wow! Luckily, amongst the other third, we had some great, experienced drivers like Nick Fonte, Stephan de Pénasse, and Kevin Oliver, who were more than happy to spend time with the less-experienced drivers and show them the fast way around.

One of the benefits of an open-faced helmet is that you can see the grins plastered on peoples faces. Based on what we observed, we’re thinking of making open-faced helmets mandatory!

At the end of the day, we had one very minor incident, but even with that everybody had a ton of fun! Quite frankly, I’d forgotten how much fun autocrossing can be!

We’re hoping to do more of these events—we’re in the process of looking for more dates and more venues. Again, if anybody can help with that, we’d greatly appreciate it, and, judging by the looks of everybody who showed up on the 17th, a whole lot of our club members would appreciate it as well!

For me, there’s no better Father’s Day present than to share your passion with your friends and family, and it was especially gratifying to watch my daughter piloting my GTV around the course—even the little off-road excursion didn’t put a damper on the great time I had.

The video clips below were taken of some of the participants in the June 17th AONE Autocross.  They are in Windows WMV video file format, and the files sizes are shown.  Click on the camera icon to launch each video clip.  (Be patient while the files download.)

(3.4MB)	Paul Leone - 1972 GTV - Class D
(6.7MB)	Kevin Redden - 1987 Verde - Class E (taken from inside his car)
(3.5MB)	Randy Wilkins - 1974 Spider - Class E
(3.5MB)	Kevin Oliver - 1974 Spider - Class F
(2.7MB)	Dave Pratt - 1961 Giulietta Spider - Class F
(3.6MB)	Vern Brown - 1976 Spider - Class F
(3.8MB)	Andy Kress - 1972 Berlina - Class H
(3.3MB)	Nick Fonte - 2003 Merciless Bends C230 - Class L
(3.7MB)	Tracey Levasseur - 1986 Push! 911SC - Class L
(3.6MB)	Chris Francis - 2003 Barbarian MotorVerken Mini - Class L