Long ago I raced at SARC when it was in Lee Stokley's garage. The track was a three-lane Paperclip with tight 180s at each end and a real tight flyover bridge with about 110-degree corners. It ran clockwise down the middle of the layout, turned right 180 to a short straight uphill to the bridge a quick right left and downhill to another flat 180 putting you on the main straight. I was one of the last of the new guys along with Bob Vincent and Doug Bradley... We raced with Roger Moon, Lee, Alan whose last name I can't recall, and this Dood named Cook who was a scale virtuoso.
We ran a lot of old MESAC classes as well as MRRC F1 and and endurance racers. I was competitive in the MRCC spec classes after I learned how to tune them and get them trued up, so driving wasn't the issue, I was getting beat by faster stuff. When the 3 of us started racing, we didn't have any gear, so we started building and borrowed slow older cars. The weapons of choice were Pittman 196d creations on older solid rubber wheels, usually on Magnesium wheels. Monograms were the tire of choice and Cook hoarded them. Lacking 196Ds was a real problem so out came the music wire, and I built a flyweight Can-Am car with an inline motor. It was a 16d based Autodynamics TI22 Lexan body and since tires were getting really scarce, and they didn't want to share them, I ran black sponge tires with silicone skins. they had a rule about no foam tires, but since they looked good, nobody cared.. The track was made for the 196Ds, the corners were tight, it was plastic track and the Pitmans could roll into the corner and were on the throttle earlier. The can motors lacked the coasting roll in and you needed to jump off the throttle deeper than the pitmans and hope the car was in the right place to throttle up, they were very difficult to drive consistently but had a faster lap in them if you drove it on the knife edge. The 16d car lacked the grunt to get off the corners, the Grp12 car was a rocket and handled well, but I never found acontroller that didnt act like a light switch.... I think if I had a larger resistor it would have gotten driveable. I never got a 196d until the last season and had a Blak Frisbee that was decent off the block and showed promise, but we lost the track before it really got moving
Our last season finale was a day-night-day enduro with identically-prepped Roger Moon Lola T600s with full lights. It was a mind numbing 2 hour endirance race with 3o minutes in the dark headlights only. The lap was only 8 seconds. Of course our car lost the lights and I iron manned the whole stint and only went down 15 ish laps. Lights came on and Doug and Bob ran em down..... We were second and it was a ball......
After that season's races, Lee, Roger and Alan decided to stop racing, Cook had moved away so Doug Bob and I moved the track out to Bob's house in Chino...
