Yesterday, I attended our event at Coles County airport. As usual, Tom Ingles and Greg Lukach did their usual fine job offering a quality autocross. It was hot, but there was a breeze. It was a pretty good day and the food was good at the Airport Steakhouse, as usual.
I noticed something I want to bring to the attention of our autocrossers. It has been years…… years, since I was the starter. This is the most important job of any “work assignment” because the starter controls the pace of the event and who enters the course and when. It is very important that an experienced autocrosser be in this position.
Having said that, I have some concerns. Course workers, of course, often consist of less experienced workers. They are the most “in-the-way” of anyone and need to be careful or they could be injured. After one of our entrants was injured at a St. Louis area autocross early in the year (not a CCSCC event, of course), we are trying to be very careful. But are we?
Yesterday’s course had a “Hit-most-often” cone that was the signal to the starter to start the next car. But the starter couldn’t see the cone. He only knew it had been hit when it was announced or the corner worker ran. Literally seconds after that cone was passed was time to send the next car. But the corner workers weren’t ‘fast’ on the response. Once I sent the next car and ONLY THEN did the corner worker start running to get the cone! So I backed off and waited. Eventually we changed corner workers and it was better.
What should a corner worker do besides chase cones? Well, we need to tell them to STAND STILL. That is right. If they are running along the course, we don’t necessarily know whether they are chasing a cone or exercising! The corner work needs to stand still if not chasing a cone. We need to tell them that.
One more comment. Comments to the starter by entrants about car spacing are not really helpful, since the entrant is not “in the starter’s shoes”. The person who needs to discuss the starting instructions with the starter is the safety steward. It would be good for us to remember that the starter is a volunteer upon whose decisions the safety of the workers and entrants depends.
For the first time I’m going to allow comments to an editorial on this web page. Bring them on!
Barry,
Appreciate your focus on safety. I was working the taxiway on Saturday and was corner captain for the first time on Sunday in the same spot. From what I can tell, we didn’t do much differently between the days (although I would argue that being a course worker requires some minimum level of concentration and attention span which maybe not everyone has) but one thing that was different was the starter.
Seems like one area of improvement would be to be more consistant from person-to-person and event-to-event for key worker assignments. That’s the only way the new guys like me will ever learn the right way to do the job. Another example is that I ran my data logger velcro’d to the passenger floor for at least two events before someone said anything – probably should’ve been pointed out in the grid before the first run, again, different people working grid/safety steward.
It is probably worthwhile to review certain safety procedures with the course workers specifically, even if it is mentioned as part of the driver meeting. No cell phones, no sitting down, no moving unless going for a cone, check wiggled cones, watch the back of the car, etc.
Thanks for another fun and safe weekend.
Stuart
Stuart has a couple of good points:
Consistency in assignment is a good goal, but probably not possible since we have so many different entrants. The place we put novices is the corner worker position because the other positions require more experience, or so we thought. Part of the problem is that older, experienced autocrossers don’t want to work corners for age related reasons. I haven’t worked a corner in 20 years! Nor should I. I’m too slow. I could, however, be a corner captain.
We started working on this problem a couple of years ago when the corner captain idea was suggested. It has been helpful.
Another idea is to tell the corner worker what to do. We have tried over the years to meet with the corner workers and tell them what to do. Usually the safety steward does this. I think your idea has been, but not consistently. We can do better and will. I’ll ask the autocross committee to discuss this.
Thanks for the comments.