Photos from January 30, 2010 at Black Rock Speedway, Dundee

This in from CNYIRA:

CNYIRA's first official event of the 2010 season was a dusty success.

This is the third year in a row that we have had an event at Black Rock and each year
has been completely different from the last year. Hopefully each year we learn something
new about land based ice racing.

In 2008 we had a great course that included a super jump and as the day went on it became
one groove of mud racing. None of us really appreciated the mud, but we all seemed to have a blast.

In 2009 we completely changed the course to avoid the car killing jump, and the mud and to have
a wider groove to facilitate passing. We also changed the weather that year. It was cold, cold, cold.
That took care of the mud problem and between the deeply frozen ground and the snow cover, we had a
surface that seemed to be more slippery than any lake we race on. Again, all had a great time.

Now we are up to 2010. We had to cancel the first date because it was getting too warm and we didn’t
want mud, or to harm the Black Rock track surface. So we waited for the weather to cooperate, and
cooperate it did, to some extent. We got the cold we needed to protect the track. And although there
was snow cover on the previous Thursday, by Saturday it was gone.

As soon as we did our first short practice session we realized we had a problem. DUST!

We didn't want to cancel the event, so in the interest of safety, we decided to run our races in
approximately 4 car groups. That seemed to work well enough in that there were no incidents of touching,
rubbing, or Harvey wall banging. In fact, although there was some attrition, none of it seemed to be
directly related to track conditions. Oh, and the other surprise was that without the snow, there was
quite a bit of grip with the exception of one very tight turn. There was lots of room to pass and
plenty of place to carry speed, and still some real challenging turns.

I would say that the course worked out great, all we needed was some snow.

There is a chance we may run more events at Black Rock this season, depending on temperatures and
the snow cover that we would like to see there.

Results for the event can be found by going to http://cnyira.com/ and clicking on results.

As usual Terrie Sautter won the chili cook-off hands down. Looks for the chili results on the same results page.


Casey

Photos courtesy of Roy Hopkins:








Three ice racing cars on one trailer. Who'd a thought?

Photos courtesy of Adam Sadlik: