What’s your favorite autocross worker assignment? | Garage Rescue Miata

Age and poor life choices limit my ability to chase cones.  Local events, I'll do anything else.

National events I've grown to like Worker Check-in.

Pros:

You get to meet a lot of people.

You get to ride in the sweep car.

You get into the timing trailer a few times (briefly) and get a glimpse of an insider...

Cons:

Worker check-in starts early, so you end up working 1.5 heats

The  sweep car "catch" isn't easy and audit sheet shuffle is hectic/high pressure (get it right!)

You don't get to see any on-course action.

Of late I've been doing the sign in. Pretty laid back.

I like announcing as well.

I don't like doing timing; I'm way to easily distracted.

My knees don't like chase cones bit if I'm on a station they usually make me a corner captain so.I'm Ok with that.

350z247 said:

This is one of the main reasons I don't autocross more: I don't want to work; I want to drive. Thus, I do track weekends instead.

This, plus the club I run with has a fee if you don't want to course work and I would pay it every time. I absolutely hate course work ever since the 2016 challenge when I felt like I was going to die every time the plywood porsche was on course. It was a very traumatic experience having a big loud red car sliding at me.

Over the number of years I have been a willing participant, I have done many of the jobs listed above.

But I have found that when it's available working "master radio" in our A/C equipped timing trailer makes the work assignment not so bad.  It does require a thick skin, on corse radio station workers that follow your instruction and the ability to multi task.  Weekend skills that keep you out of the sun in Southern California do have a cost.

But I am now old, I have done my time shagging cones.  But it has not helped my handwriting to make it better, the boxes on the forms need to be bigger. 

In reply to jr02518 :

I have audited the times. Then I look at the sheet and wonder, Whose chicken scratch is this? 

I guess my favorite is the starter position, since I can talk to everyone. My least favorite is anything to do with timing and scoring. Way to ADD to focus that long.

I was never enough of a "regular" with any club to get the cushy jobs.  Therefore, pretty easy to assume a position out on-course, in the sun.  During your course walk, figure out which is "the tricky spot."  One work station is going to be the "busy station."  Avoid that station.  At the station you do choose, if your the "older guy" then be sure there are some young'ens out there with you.  Then, when you arrive at the work station, grab the radio and educate the young'ens to be sure they know how to replace the cones they'll be running after.  

350z247 said:

This is one of the main reasons I don't autocross more: I don't want to work; I want to drive. Thus, I do track weekends instead.

I concur. Shagging cones != seat time 

However I love the atmosphere of an autox over a track day, much more laidback (on non-competition days) and more time to be friendly to people. At a track day, you're really working in seat time in the 20 minute sessions and the in between session time is spent catching your breath/hydrating. I don't like talking to people in between HPDE sessions because I'm trying to not sweat up a storm. 

Anyways to actually answer the thread question, I don't like working at all, but if I had to pick, somewhere near the start of the course. People typically don't run over cones at the beginning of the course so I get to keep it chill. 

The calculus of autocross doesn't work for me anymore.  It was fine when I was young and didn't have kids and a job responsibilities to balance the needs of.  It seems fine for older folks who are retired or empty-nesters and have more free time.  And that seems to be the common demographic spread of attendees: first timers and old timers. Trucker Hats vs Straw Hats? :)

I'm absolutely happy to help out in any meaningful way possible.  I don't mind work.  It is frustrating to be parked on a corner station with 6 people and not much to do, though.  Club veterans get the interesting jobs, and that's the way it should be -- they need to keep the event running and safe.  

I look forward to getting back into the sport once life slows down a little and I can afford time to burn a whole Sunday.  Until then, it's occasional HPDEs or race weekends for me, with the rest of the Sundays spent with the rest of the family.  

Well, since I used to be AX chair of our club, I didn't get to pick a favorite.  Though I do enjoy course design and like to think I'm pretty decent at it.

My least favorite worker position was the one where I was clearly very busy handling 3 different problems and some idiot wandered up to interrupt with a dumb question like "Which one is station 4 again?" and I had to be polite about it.

At the challenge last year I was the starter for a while.  I like that.  Low stress.

Last year when I saw a picture of me as the starter, I realized my tshirt was on inside-out.  I'm NOT a morning person.

I prefer Grid to corner work, because you're active the whole session and the time flies by. Start is fun, but since you're sitting still there's somehow less reprieve from the sun. I learned a few years ago the value of the long-sleeve t-shirt, bucket hat, and a big water cooler. 

I really enjoyed working the gate...getting entrants to sign the SCCA and Track waivers.  You got to meet everyone, see every car, etc.  The one drawback is having to get up at 4AM to be first at the venue.

I really enjoy the starter position,  learning the cars and sending them out at the proper time so the event runs as smoothly as possible which equals more runs.

Same as grid, getting the cars ready and at the line makes the event run so much better.

Tech is fun, although for whatever reason I'm getting cranky with cars flunking tech and the drivers knew better.  I'm really getting better with cars coming back to the next event with a janky fix from what flunked last time.  It is blast to help someone pass so they can run the event.

Auto cross is about so much more than just cars, the whole of the even is fun.

In reply to Opti :

I was chased by a Tiger at an autocross once. Somehow the road-racing advice to aim for the spinning car seemed a little intimidating when I was on foot...

This is one of the main reasons I don't autocross more: I don't want to work; I want to drive. Thus, I do track weekends instead.

It never ceases to amaze me how in any autocross conversation, there are at least a half-dozen folks compelled to parachute in to say they don't autocross because they don't want to work/want more seat time/want shorter days/whatever, whatever, whatever.  Do autocrossers troll HPDE and road racing discussions to explain why they don't?  If it's your thing, the work, the seat time, and whatall aren't hardships.  If it's not, feel no guilt...or at least be silent about it! 

My favorite autox worker position: announcer. You get to sit in the shade (as about a squillion others have said), and if you're familiar with the drivers you can give a little color to the announcing.

Which is a good intro to my favorite gig in motorsport for the past few years: announcing for the Dash for Kids, a late-summer weekend at Portland International Raceway, all about raising money for Dornbecher Children's Hospital. I get to sit in an air-conditioned room (T&S tower, right at the start-finish line), talk into the microphone about what's going on (including Plugging The Sponsor), and watch race cars for a couple of days. All while being part of taking care of sick kids. 

In reply to Warlock :

Happy to be of service

Warlock said:

This is one of the main reasons I don't autocross more: I don't want to work; I want to drive. Thus, I do track weekends instead.

It never ceases to amaze me how in any autocross conversation, there are at least a half-dozen folks compelled to parachute in to say they don't autocross because they don't want to work/want more seat time/want shorter days/whatever, whatever, whatever.  Do autocrossers troll HPDE and road racing discussions to explain why they don't?  If it's your thing, the work, the seat time, and whatall aren't hardships.  If it's not, feel no guilt...or at least be silent about it! 

Since you appear to be are fairly new here; the group tends to be a free form discussion that strays from the orginal topic. This is mostly because the hive is a mix of people who have actual ADD or automotive ADD................or both.

The GRM folks are very good about posting up "conversation starters" so a post may start out talking about working autocross and evolve into talking about working road course events and back to autocross again.

This is the main reason I'm on here..................."God help me I love it so"

This is my long winded way of saying; we do a lot of parchuting in here.

I will say that Grid Chief, at a local level, is a pretty great job. You get to BS with the drivers as they're waiting, watch some racing, and by the afternoon sessions, grid pretty much runs itself. People know when to pull up and do so of their own accord. As it is, right from the beginning of the event, we just tell two-driver cars to head to the line when they have completed their swap or whenever they are ready.

Grid at a National level can be kind of unpleasant. I remember getting literally screamed at by Kathy Barnes as the reason she was dead last in her class, because I was "rushing" her and her co-driver between runs (they were getting their minimum mandated 5 minutes but that apparently wasn't enough). A few other drivers got kind of nasty with me as well because they wanted more time between runs as well, but we technically weren't shortchanging them, since they were all getting the guaranteed 5 minutes.

Timing was always my favorite.  It's in the shade and you get to sit down (we had no AC in our trailer, but the site was just a couple miles from the ocean so it was rarely all that hot).  Sure there's a lot to do, but we had the system down pretty well and it meant that I got to really follow everything that was happening during the group I was working.

Autox was a good match for me when the kids were little.  Lower cost than track days, plus less of a time commitment, I would leave early in the AM and usually be home by mid-afternoon.  Yes, it's not a ton of seat time, but that's not the way to look at it.  I went for the social aspect, it was an excuse to hang out with my car friends on and do a little bit of driving while I'm there.

Unfortunately that club kinda disintegrated, so I wound up going back to track days when the kids were a bit older.  Now that's morphed into w2w racing with NASA -- I had to go up to race control for some licensing paperwork at the last event and was looking over the timing/etc equipment and thinking about the similarities. :)

Tom1200 said:

Since you appear to be are fairly new here...

Not exactly...just not affected with the need to type all the time.  Off the target....

Safety Steward. I get to watch all the action, as well as monitor grid and paddock. Yes, you have to be on your feet and alert, but it suits my nervous energy well. 

I've always run cones at the few events I've been too but have wondered if I'm qualified to ask to work grid now after working with Gridlife. Surely autocross grid can't be as bad as trying to grid up 50 GLTC cars in a ~25 car space at Mid Ohio.

Warlock said:

Tom1200 said:

Since you appear to be are fairly new here...

Not exactly...just not affected with the need to type all the time.  Off the target....

Sadly the rest of us have freed ourselves from this.