The Track

This is a view of the track from one end of the room. The track will eventually move from the romm you see here to the larger addition which is where I stood to take this picture. From here you can see almost the whole track. The tricky twisty section is hidden behind a marshall. Tom Bowman (in the black MM shirt) and Ed Needham (to Tom's left) are marshalling the elevation (where it's a pain to marshall). That's track call central. Marshalling the car end is Bill Greiss.

Well you can see what a steady hand I had when I took this shot. This is from the other side of the room. The longest straight (on the far right, almost 12') is where you gotta punch it, but let off in time for your car to enter the 180 degree curve at the end. In the dreaded blue lane, you get the inside lane of a 6" hairpin curve. You might think the yellow lane is good with the outside of a 12" hairpin, but is goes immediately into an inside 6". An easy place to lose it if your car's rear end hasn't come back in time. There are many racers whose cars smack into the wooden wall at the end of this straight from all 4 lanes.

This is the elevated section that a lot of racers were up in arms about when it debuted in April 2000. This is actually a little different than is was then. The straight at the far end is the entrance to this section. It is longer than it was originally, so you have a shot to floor it there. I didn't realize that I cut off the descending curve section, which is pretty tight for the yellow lane--more inside 6" curves! This section immediately follows the start (marked in gold, just to the right of the counter dead strip), so you start with a high degree of difficulty and a lot of rubbing.

From here, this section looks relatively benign. But when you're standing 12 feet away at the blue lane driver's station, this section is nasty. You can see tha the blue lane has a bunch of inside 6" curves (only 2 aren't!) in this section. Only the yellow lane driver is afforded this view of this section, all others are at least 4 feet away. It's a busy spot for a marshall. Conveniently, I happened to capture the entrance and exit of the elevation that I missed in the previous picture.

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