Wednesday Racing/Classifieds/Community Thread

Open to all readers. Focusing on the autocross fatalities but also including some housekeeping items

Before we discuss the unpleasant core matter of this week’s Racing Thread, I have some housekeeping to share.

For Those About To Renew (Or Who Failed The Renewal)

About 53 readers who signed up in July have had their subscription renewal fail due to card expiration or cancellation. If you’re now unable to see the paid stuff but you can see this thread, you might be among them. Got to https://substack.com/settings and change your payment method. As with many other aspects of Substack, this is a bit difficult and “buggy”. Thank you for reading, for supporting the site, and for your patience.

If You Hate “The Donald”, You Might Love This Book

Here at ACF, the readers get their books out faster than I do! The Grift is a photographic study of how President Trump and his followers interacted on the campaign trail. Beautifully shot and staged, The Grift is a great example of visual storytelling. Note that Andy is not a fan of the forty-fifth President, but I believe that he comes from a place of honest conviction and it shows up in his work.

No Lowballers, I Know What I Have

Another ACF reader, some fellow named “Arutunoff”, if that is in fact his real name, tells us that

Can i barge in and say i'm selling my old cars please? '72 mog 4/4 series v comp, winner of first palm springs vintage race in '85 and its monterey historics race in '80. driven okla-calif and back twice. lovely shape. cunningham c3 retro-rod, a dud on bringatrailer, lancia flavia zagato with rebuilt engine and a spare race engine never installed from 13 years ago; 2 art cars by deceased romanian sculptor michael pistol--villa d'este was interested in the mga-based car but i didn't have fiva papers. so art deco it makes the chrysler building look like a mud hut! these creatures have been sitting pretty much since i lost my leg in '11 but the cunningham was recently finished and is like a new car. last chassis built by the factory; car never completed until about '82. thanks for letting me butt in!

If you’re interested in any of these, let me know and I’ll put you in touch.

My Version Of The Harbor Freight Club, For High-End Headphones

When my storage unit was burgled last year, the idiots took the box for my Focal Elex headphones, but not the headphones. However, I didn’t realize this for a while, and I replaced the headphones I hadn't actually lost. So now I have more Focals than I can wear. If you are mentally healthy enough to own a set of exceptional headphones without the lovely accompanying presentation box, I will sell my Elexes to you for

$299 shipped!!!!!

which is just above a third of what they cost new. These headphones have perhaps twenty hours on them. This offer is for annual subscribers only, so… it’s still cheaper to subscribe to ACF if you haven’t already and buy my Elexes then it would be to pay the $500-600 that you’d need for a raggedy set of these on eBay. First comment gets them and I’ll contact you to finish the deal.

I’m going to do periodic lowball sales like this to paid subscribers, just to keep things interesting. The next item to likely come up: the fabled TactileTurn pen in Gulf colors, an undamaged example of which has never been sold in the secondary market.

Alright, Enough Stalling, Let’s Get To It

Here’s the press release, which I’m sure some of you have already seen:

The Sports Car Club of America® is saddened to announce the passing of two Club members — Amber Dawn Jorgensen and Des Toups — following an incident at a ProSolo® event held at the former Hampton Mills facility in Packwood, WA, July 14-16.

On Sunday morning, July 16, a vehicle in the competition continued past the finish line and struck another member and a solid structure. The remainder of the event was promptly cancelled. Both Toups and Jorgensen later passed away.

Contrary to what I’d initially heard, the sixty-something Des Toups was the driver, in a new Elantra “N”. Jorgensen was in a port-a-potty at the time, which is not conductive to being aware of vehicles on course. Supposedly Toups “was on new medication”. His brother is stating that he had a massive heart attack and just stayed on the gas until he crushed the porta-a-potty between his front bumper and a massive steel building. Some local autocrosser made this diagram of the incident, which looks uncomfortably like a Jeremy Clarkson visual joke:

The day after the incident, a particularly unpopular fellow on the Grassroots forums noted that

There exists within autocross a culture of "you didn't see nothing" Any time there is an incident people are strongly discouraged from taking photos video or talking about it because "we could lose the site" The illusion that autocross is a perfect;y safe hobby has to be maintained so that outsiders will let us race on their property. The problem with this illusion is that people start to believe it. Then complacency sets in.

The org in question is the NWR-SCCA. I was working course and a vehicle lost control and spun through my work station, narrowly avoiding hitting me. A racing incident, not a big deal really. I radioed in the four-off, reset the cones and got back to work. The org has a rule that if a car leaves the racing surface for any reason it's a dq and you are parked for the day. 10 minutes later the same car come racing by again. after the session had ended I went to find the people in charge to make sure that had heard that there was a four-off. The safety steward told me "they knew, but it was ok because they weren't driving dangerously and that I needed to stop worrying about it."  I'd disagree, driver fault or not I did have to run to avoid being struck by a car which then left the racing surface. They're your rules, if you're not going to enforce them then why have them? The steward's nonchalant attitude towards a very legitimate grievance was enough for me to withdraw from the rest of the season's events. If they didn't start taking safety seriously somebody is going to get killed…

At the last event I attended in Bremmerton a car left the racing surface, skidded across a hundred feet of wet grass and crashed ass-first through a fence onto an active airfield. We were told not to take pictures because we might lose the site. If anyone ever races at Packwood again, I'll eat my hat.

Brother Bark and I can vouch for the “keep it quiet” culture in autocross, particularly National-caliber autocrosss; many years ago we were working a corner at the Toledo ProSolo and watched a vehicle roll in the slalom thanks to the sudden rim failure of a low-quality aftermarket wheel (sold by the Tire Rack, according to people familiar with it.) After we rolled it upright, the crumpled Mini Cooper was then put on a trailer and dumped in a ditch some plausible distance from the event so the owner, who was not driving but rather just hyper-simping for the attractive five-foot-ten female car-borrower behind the wheel at the time of the incident, could get his money out of the insurance company.

At the same time, one must consider the fact that site sourcing and use is the most difficult part of running a successful autocross program. You have to convince the owner of a massive concrete or asphalt lot that they need to clear it off on weekends so SCCA members can compete on it. It doesn’t help that modern standards for parking-lot safety now typically include a LOT of lighting, so in most cases any facility built after 1990 isn’t even worth pursuing. There is literally zero upside for the facility owner here, because the sum total of registration fees for an autocross is rarely more than two thousand dollars and some of that has to go elsewhere. And the downside is considerable, from mere site damage or angry corporate neighbors who don’t like the noise or traffic to potential eight-figure liability issues.

Many gentle lies about autocross are told in the sourcing and securing process, most of them regarding the risk to which anyone might be exposed. The same 40-year-old nerds who describe street-tire regional AX to their co-workers on Mondays like it’s a combination of LMP1 and “The Wheel Of Death” will turn around and explain to a site owner that “speeds are limited to 45mph” and “trained stewards prevent all incidents”. But the mark in question is gonna Google for answers no matter what he’s told in the pitch meeting, so there is also always a concerted efforts to keep pictures and incident descriptions off the Web.

I won’t get into whether more people are “snowflakes” than they were in 1927 or whenever. That’s an argument for the culture war to resolve, I suppose. It is plain on the face of things, however, that this society is much more risk oriented than it was even two decades ago. The majority of people in American corporations approach every situation like the “deal-killing attorney” of Winning Through Intimidation fame. Nobody wants to say “yes” to anything except layoffs and outsourcing. Everything else is seen as a potential landmine for careers. This tendency is so pronounced now in the average office that it’s become easier to detect fraudsters and thieves, since they’re often the only people who can get excited about ANYTHING that isn’t either a “proven business trend” or a cost reduction.

In this atmosphere, it’s hard to find a site for autocrossing. And it’s about to get tougher, because as the middle class in America ages out you will have more and more 50-and-up drivers who are simply more prone to having a heart attack or other physical problem while competing, even in the relatively youth-friendly world of autocross. Every fatal or even near-fatal incident that occurs will lose the site involved plus others who lose their nerve after hearing the news. Every autocrosser I know can recite the names of the dead sites: here in Ohio I can think of a half-dozen brilliant venues that were lost due to misadventure during an event or just a bit of increased caution on the part of the owners.

Solving this issue to any significant degree will likely take some Big Thinking, maybe something like a unified insurance/holding corporation to lease lots at all these abandoned shopping malls and commercial real estate enterprises. In the meantime, spare a thought for these two competitors. Most of us road racers have at least an awareness of the fact that we might get killed doing what we love. Autocrossers tend to not feel that way, especially after a few years’ worth of having cars run by their corner station like aggressive but fundamentally harmless creatures. Your mind shrinks to the parking lot and what you perceive as the risks.

If you’re a fellow with a reasonable amount of stiffness in your spine and a desire to see things done right — many of you are, if my in-person meetings are any guide — consider joining your local SCCA to help out with safety. It’s a nice way to meet people, find some deals on some neat cars, just be away from a screen for a moment. In 2023, that is a truly noble pursuit, even if you don’t prevent any fatalities along the way.