Yes, this column is about practice - and more specifically, how there's just way too much of it.
Much of the discussion about today’s racing scene revolves around how to lower the cost of attending large events - after all, that’s why two of the biggest electric off-road races in the world, the ROAR Nationals and IFMAR Worlds, have both gone to a ridiculous “spec tire” rule. It always seems like, after a week-long race often held on an artificially abrasive track that tears apart tires and renders brand new kits almost useless, that everyone comes up with their own ideas on how to make racing less expensive - for both the factory teams and weekend warriors alike.
Here’s an idea: why not eliminate most of the practice time?
At a large nitro race, with four qualifying rounds and even an hour-long main event, you’re spending about 90 minutes of time on the track actually racing. It’s less than half that time for an electric race, even with triple A-Mains. If you’ve attended any national-level event for the duration over the last 10-12 years, and hit the track for every allotted practice run, you’ve likely spent significantly more time than that, if not at least double, on the drivers’ stand when there was no clock running at all. For 2014, every ROAR National Championship allotted two full days just for practice. This weekend’s Hot Rod Hobbies Shootout has two days of practice and two days of racing. And standing in line to get onto the drivers’ stand at the Cactus Classic, even during “controlled practice,” has been a running joke for over a decade.
By contrast, some of the most competitive years at The Dirt Nitro Challenge were when rain cancelled practice completely and the racers were simply given an extra couple of minutes during warm-up for the first round in order to learn the track layout.
There’s simply no reason to allow racers the opportunity to burn hundreds of dollars in time and equipment, not to mention spending an extra couple of days living out of expensive hotels (and away from their bill-paying jobs). Why is this necessary? So that everyone can burn hundreds of meaningless laps, trying dozens of setup combinations, and “testing” every little thing they can find? With the exception of Chris Bing’s home-track advantage at the ROAR Nationals in 1996, the excessive amount of practice never ends up leading to a drastic change in finishing order. There’s hardly ever a “Cinderella” story of an unknown driver miraculously making the main event, and the best drivers always manage to find the top of their respective classes no matter how many dozens of battery packs or fuel tanks they ran in practice.
And don’t get me started on warm-up races. Rather than limiting access to the host track for the weeks and months prior to an important event, these makeshift money grabs try to entice racers to make a completely separate trip - or they risk giving up valuable track time. And for what? The chance to run on a different layout with a surface that may not resemble anything like the actual event? At this year’s ROAR Fuel Off-Road Nationals, seven of the fifteen finalists in both Truck and Buggy classes didn’t attend the warm-up, including 1/8-Scale Truck National Champion Dakotah Phend.
In fact, there is no official warm-up race for this year’s 1/8-Scale Off-Road Worlds in Messina, Italy just for this reason - an increase of industry pressure to remove the unnecessary expense that may have little or no effect on the outcome of the actual World Championship.
Riders for an AMA National Motocross race typically get less than 30 minutes of practice on the day of the event, before putting their lives at risk manhandling a 200+ lb. machine around a winding and whooped-out track which can take well over two minutes to complete just one lap. So why do RC racers need so much practice?
7/2/2014
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