Discuss the various formats for historic racing

[nzeder]

When I first got involved with a car club in mid 90's the club held a 2 day weekend at Pukekohe. Racing grids were based solely on lap time. I even made an application to help produce grids based on lap times throughout the day. This meant if you got faster during the day you could get pushed up to a faster grid.

Ok sure these meetings were not for point based on a series. I was only in my early 20's and joined this car club as I was interested in the marque/model while I saved for one of the cars in question (20 years later, 7 of these cars have passed or stayed in my garage). I recall talking to competitors on the dummy grids of these meeting, fun is what they were all having.

The time based grids were 100% reverse grids. Grid size was selected by laptime spreed but always targeted at 20 to 25 cars and it did not matter what marques/model, only open wheelers/historics had their own time based grids. Starts were also handicapped with the goal of getting the grid to cross the finish line within the field laptime differential. E.G. if the laptime between the fastest car and slowest car was 5 seconds the handicapping was set so most of the grid of 20 would pass the start finish line within 5 seconds of each other. It may have been fun for the competitors but it was nuts in the timing bus with just a single pc managing the timing, it was bit manual writing race numbers down as someone called them out as the speed past.

The club has not held a race meeting for many years now, sad but as members moved on or like me started families and moved OS I guess these thing happen.

Again my impressions on these meeting held by The Datsun Z Club in the 90's was FUN, competitors having FUN racing different makes/models held under the T&C rules of the day, based solely on laptimes. ( It was not fun in the timing bus, but we knew the harder it was for us the closer the racing/finish was)

Regards
Mike