Do you see run group max numbers climbing?

Just back from Summit for a FATT (Friday at the Track) event. Weather was a zillion times better than predicted, so it was a fun day.

They have gone from 4 groups running 20 minute sessions to 3 groups running 25 minutes. The problem with this was that although novice and Int. groups were capped at 24 cars, the advanced was capped at 34. It was very very busy and difficult to get in any clean laps where you weren't passing someone or being passed multiple times each lap. I really enjoy dicing it up but it's nice to get a mix of both clean and dicing laps. It's HPDE and not racing.

I saw this as well at Lime Rock running with SCDA. They were capped at 25 cars on a very short track. Never had that much traffic at LR last season.

After Summit, it was pretty unanimous with everyone we talked with that they would prefer 20 minute sessions with fewer cars, and we've contacted the organizers to see if they can go back to the old format.

Are you seeing a similar change in your regions? Or, do you prefer lots of cars with continual passing vs. a higher % of clean laps?

I'd say on busy weekends our groups are 30+ cars each. That being said RA is 4 miles so it isn't an issue for us.

30+ on RA does sound reasonable. We had >34 on Summit and it was really tight for HPDE.

I did a PCA Founders Region HPDE in April on Summit Main with 36 cars in the White Group. It does make you work to keep up! And improve your SA, a necessity for advancing to the higher run groups. Which, at the same event, had 45 and 47 in the Black and Red run groups, respectively. Those numbers make me wonder if I truly want to move up a run group!

jmason said:

I did a PCA Founders Region HPDE in April on Summit Main with 36 cars in the White Group. It does make you work to keep up! And improve your SA, a necessity for advancing to the higher run groups. Which, at the same event, had 45 and 47 in the Black and Red run groups, respectively. Those numbers make me wonder if I truly want to move up a run group!

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Once you hit those numbers at Summit it becomes something other than HPDE in my opinion. With far fewer numbers you still are going to get many passing opportunities in each direction, but at least you can get a number of clean laps to fine tune your lines and work on different approaches to the track.

Happily a few of us were concerned enough that we wrote to the organizers and they are seriously reconsidering lowering the numbers and using more smaller sized groups with a few minutes less track time.

I'm jelly with you guys and your big tracks. Here we have Arroyo Seco Raceway, which is a 1.4mi course. We normally get no more than 25~27 cars per event, and they're chopped into two run groups in the morning before superlap in the afternoon.