Some of you might not even remember this but back when Dunnville was trying to stay open, TMP came out against them. While it wasn’t the sole reason that Dunnville eventually was forced to close, it definitely was a shit move.
Because of this we haven’t had any NYSpeed track days there (or anywhere) for years.
Since then Bing, MPD47 & myself have been trying to make moves with various places to bring back some sort of track day. Some of these you know about (Dunntire Raceway killing our planned day for example) and others you don’t because they’re more long term.
Stepping back for a moment, when I say track day, this is the criteria I use: About 1 hour away & about $100. Obviously there are actual road courses out there where if you’re more serious you can sign up. They cost more in time, travel & fees which some people don’t mind. But most people are not that serious about driving on the track so this doesn’t appeal to them. And no, AutoX isn’t a viable alternative for reasons we’ve covered at length before. I’m looking for a parallel experience to what we had at Dunnville.
It seems like we’ve tried EVERYWHERE to set something up like we had at Dunnville. No dice. Nothing fits my criteria… except for TMP.
So what do you guys think? Should we give it a shot? And has anyone been to the open car lapping at TMP this year?
Since TMP has so many open car lapping days we could just pick one and go as a group. And since nearly everyone has access to decent lap timing software with their smartphones, we could keep a lap time board here for just us.
The downside is that we might be there with people who suck. And I’m not sure, but the last time I was there for an open lapping day safety wasn’t a high priority for the track staff… but that was quite a few years ago now.
I’m going to head up on a Wednesday night to open lapping (5pm to dusk, $70) and see how things go. No idea what day yet exactly but I can’t imagine a Wednesday night drawing a lot of lapping traffic.
Mike @ Innovative and Mike H both went up for a Wednesday earlier this year and I don’t believe either had any issues. I went once with Justin and Mike towards the end of last year and there were 3? cars there. The biggest issue I remember having the last time we took a LARGE group there (UBRF) was that they were dealing with the noise complaints/lawsuits at the time so they were insane about sound testing. Which I haven’t seen them do in at least 3 years.
I was there as well, and there were about 6 cars total. As was said, Tmp does not care about safety for lapping days. Arrive and drive. I’ve never seen them sound check a car in the past 2 years/6 lapping days. Its one guy at the entrance to the track with a few flags.
The big drama up there now is the police. For the CSCS events they sit on the roads and pull over every car going to the event to check them for safety, supposedly including trailered cars. I haven’t heard of this happening for lapping days, obviously due to the thousands less cars attending.
Onyx, if you have any specific questions you can ask myself or mike h. We are up there a few times a year…probably headed up in the next week or 2 before Mosport in July.
I am certainly not a fan of supporting anybody that would stand against dunville but I might be game at the end of the season if I have a car worthy of road coursing. I don’t really have a lot of ambition to do more road course events with my battle ship one was enough.
edit: after getting the chance to run a couple different legit road courses I have a lot less interest in running something like TMP, but with it being so close it is way easier to get my friends who are nervous about racing road course to drop a small amount of money for a day of fun.
Definitely time to let it go and get back to some good NYSpeed cheap track day nights.
I still say TMP showing up at that hearing to blast Dunnville was a shitty move, but to play devils advocate they did have some reason to be upset. TMP went through the long and expensive process to get proper zoning with a racing license and open a track. Once they were up and operating some guy 20 minutes down the street skipped all that process and just declared his airport/commercial zoning gave him permission to run a competing track.
Dunnville was screwed with or without TMP jumping on the anti-Dunnville bandwagon. The minute Dunnville decided to try splitting hairs with the definition of “racing” to fastrack their project without getting a racing license they were done.
It’s $70 for a Wednesday night if you pre-reg (one week in advance) and $20 more if you just want to pay at the door (maybe the weather is iffy, etc.) which isn’t bad either.
