President’s Message July 2014

President’s Message July 2014

I hope you all had a great Canada Day as we move into the summer months and the warmer weather. We held two successful slaloms last month, one on June 1st and the other on June 21st with turnouts of 55 and 43 cars respectively.

Spring Series III had a maximum turn out on the day which was help along by the fantastic weather. The crazy big turnout for the Swap and Shop combined with an event on Bear Mountain put us behind schedule so we all likely missed out on that eight run. However, the course included one of my favourite elements; a G-circle. This type of elements is a lesson in patience and control and further emphasize the Autoslalom mantra of “Go slow to be fast”.

Summer Series I was well attended considering it was on a Saturday. Over the last few years we have tried to avoid Saturday’s with many people unable to attend because of work commitments. This event was also Alex Theologus’ first time as a course designer and event organizer. The course was very well laid out and transitioned well between the major elements. He also did a great job on the day organizing all aspects of the event. This event also saw us ditch the bar code scanner and only use numbers. I know talking with everyone at timing this sped staging cars up immensely. I think numbers are our new best friend. Nice job Alex and thank you, we look forward to your next creation!

We did have one incident at the finish line with one of our new IR transmitters being taken out. We had ordered a spare set but they were not delivered until the next day. However, the quick decision to get the old RaceAmerica gear out only delayed the session by about 20 minutes and we were up and running again. It is very fortunate we have backup gear but I would like to remind everyone that if you hit the gear you are responsible for the cost to replace it.

The staggering of event registration with members having a priority for the first half of the registration period has had a number of very positive affect. First it has help to speed up registration and tech. Since members have priority registration it has also bolstered our membership numbers. We have been close to one hundred members in recent years but this year we have 114 as of this writing and four events to go in the 2014 season. Another really helpful aspect is we have a lot of people arriving early and volunteering for event duties. This makes putting the event on a lot easier when we have such a deep pool of experienced helpers on hand.

On a more somber note, long time member and six term president of VMSC Bill, Rumsby passed away recently. I looked back through the perpetual trophy winners and his name is there on several occasions. http://vmsc.ca/?page_id=1097 Paul Whitworth knew Bill well and has written a very nice piece about him on the VMSC forum. http://www.vmsc.ca/cgi-bin/yabb2/YaBB.pl?num=1403744913/2#2

Hope to see you all out at the next event which will be a test and tune Autoslalom on July 26th. Come out a try out a new set of tires or tweak that suspension to try different settings. We’ll also have some experience drivers on hand for ride-alongs and guidance.

Cheers,

Karl Rhynas