WLAC versus Mammoth?

[Scott Peer]

As you may have already heard, the WLAC construction should be underway now, and the permit to use Sophomore Drive will take months to get worked out (it involves negotiations between LA County and WLAC that are bigger than us), meaning our next chance to race there will probably be October. I'll keep posting as I hear more.

In the meantime, I'm working with Mammoth to try to get a race in the Canyon Lodge parking lot at Mammoth (5 hours north of LA, 5 hours east of San Francisco). George and I skated there over the weekend again. The pavement is not too great, similar to WLAC. But the length (40 second GS) and width (several rows of parking) are excellent, and the pitch varies from quite gentle to similar to the WLAC GS hill (almost 10%). It has straight sections with a curve in the middle. The weather in the summer there (elevation 8000feet) is cool and clear and generally beautiful (crisp clean air and trees all around). Lodging and camping are plentiful, with off-season rates since it's not ski season.

My thought was to have a GS slalomcross:
- start racers side by side with "ready-set-go" signal
- first section has about a dozen cones in dual parallel format
- second section (where the parking lot curves and it would be difficult to have fair parallel courses) merge into one set of open sweeper turns. I call this the pursuit section because the second racer is trying to catch the first. If the two hit the merge at the same time, it will be interesting with the outside racer trying to hold onto the line (absolutely no contact allowed). This would probably be rather fast and open like super-G.
- last section: the course forks to another dozen dual parallel GS cones on the fairly level area to the finish line. At the finish line a judge would call the winner.

That would allow mostly parallel racing with unobstructed passing, with the middle section being single course (possibly faster) for fairness around the turn where it might be difficult to pass.

Questions:
- what about knocked cones? It would be hard to apply penalties, then the first racer might not win? Also, if the first racer knocks some cones into the path of the second, that could make it hard for the second racer. Perhaps allow 2 cones, no penalty, the third cone is a DSQ?

- how many racers would travel to Mammoth?

- is the entry fee an issue? It might be more expensive (I'm still negotiating), would $40 or $50 for a day's racing be OK?

- the logistics of setting up timing could be an issue. How about running some sort of round robin to establish seeding for the dual brackets? Or hand times?

Please respond with your thoughts on all of this, as well as any other ideas you have.

Thanks,

Scott