Feeling the pride

Well, I just saw a video of the rally course I designed and constructed (supervised) on our property. I've never designed a course and was limited to the size and shape of our property but all in all I think it turned out great. We had a rally sprint on March 31st and this is a video of two of the competitors. I hope it's ok to post this video from youtube here. I feel like a proud father of a new rally course and training & testing area.

Mark Bullock
Plan B Racing

Looks good Mark! Reminds me alot of our test facility actually. Wish the editing was a little less ADD and maybe just in car all the way around the track.

What's the length? Time to complete? Average speed? Top speed? What's the cost to drive out there? Annual memberships or day passes?

One thing we've learned is that the twisty areas, where it's fairly straight overall but with some twisty's through the straight, will become straight. The natural instinct is to try to straightline it and get as close to the berm as possible, and before you know it, the berms keep moving further out and suddenly it's pretty much a flat out straight away. We put a bunch of old tires on the insides of some of the hairpins, but I think we're going to move them to one of the twisty areas to try to restore some of the twistyness.
Also, the whole thing will get wider. We started with a fairly narrow track originally with no room for passing anywhere on it. Now it's probably 3-5 feet wider almost everywhere with room to pass in a few places.

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Grant Hughes

NoCoast Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Looks good Mark! Reminds me alot of our test
> facility actually. Wish the editing was a little
> less ADD and maybe just in car all the way around
> the track.
>
> What's the length? Time to complete? Average
> speed? Top speed? What's the cost to drive out
> there? Annual memberships or day passes?
>
> One thing we've learned is that the twisty areas,
> where it's fairly straight overall but with some
> twisty's through the straight, will become
> straight. The natural instinct is to try to
> straightline it and get as close to the berm as
> possible, and before you know it, the berms keep
> moving further out and suddenly it's pretty much a
> flat out straight away. We put a bunch of old
> tires on the insides of some of the hairpins, but
> I think we're going to move them to one of the
> twisty areas to try to restore some of the
> twistyness.
> Also, the whole thing will get wider. We started
> with a fairly narrow track originally with no room
> for passing anywhere on it. Now it's probably 3-5
> feet wider almost everywhere with room to pass in
> a few places.
>
> Grant Hughes
> www.nocoastmotorsports.net
> Denver, CO


It's a 6 mile track with a few different transit areas so it can be ran in a number of different ways. 20' wide, varying terrain from hard pack with gravel to sand. So far the fastest logged time was in a class 10 offroad car with alot of suspension and travel at 7.32 minutes. Fastest rally car was William Hoffman PGT at 7.62 minutes. Our straight has 2-3' berms on both sides so where it bends if you try cutting too close there will be problems. Speeds are somewhere around 80 average in that section, but we haven't had an open class car on course yet. Built it wide so that fwd, rwd and awd cars can pick their lines best suited to the way the cars drive. Alot of the curves are off camber, some fast others slow, average speed is around 42-45 mph. I just found two more videos of our car with an incar video on the course, we had rented the car to a couple of guys who had done the Targa Newfoundland a couple of times and wanted to try their hand at gravel. They got about 3/4 of their laps in before our rack and pinion power steering went out.





Also when I watch the video I wish I could change the gearing on the car at least for 1-3 to close ratio.

Mark, I have a full run uncut/edited if you'd like. If you want any of that on a hi-res CD, just let me know I'll be happy to burn a CD for you.

JB

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Jon Burke - KI6LSW
Blog: http://psgrallywrx.blogspot.com/

Yeah Jon, that would be great. It was cool to see the video perspective on the course finally.

bump!

I still need to burn the high-def on a CD, but here's what I got so far.....took me long enough, eh?





no editing, no music (in fact, no sound at all), just 1 run, counter clockwise, 5.1 miles.

me driving

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Jon Burke - KI6LSW
Blog: http://psgrallywrx.blogspot.com/

I've got in-car from Plan B. Every stage, day and night. I'll see if I can
put something together, but, uh...not until after this weekend.


-michel

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Self-righteous douche canoe