I want to preface this by saying this isn’t meant to be a slam at all, more of an explination. Since I’ve done proabably about 75% of the WNY courses over the past 3 years, I just wanted to say that the reason I never use Chicago boxes is that I consider them a waste of cones. Chicago boxes are just 3 cone slolams surrounded by a wall. It’s even stated in the rule book that Chicago box is a slolam in the rule book I believe.
Anyways, in that line of thinking, the most challenging courses aren’t fast or slow, they’re the ones that leave room for interpretation, allow you have mulitple choises in what line to take. That’s why I generally try to use as few cones as possible to start, and then add cones for safety purposes.
Out of the box thinking is great. It’s embarassing how much time I’ve used to try to make ECCN more interesting, but there are other considerations to be made. So in judging how receptive people would be to moving grid further down, which way are you talking about? If you mean to make the area we normally run in bigger, what you’d be doing is making the course longer, and adding to the space where you’d be having to use the runway where you’re forced to use slolams and offsets. So just a warning, when we started running there, we were having 90+ second courses, which don’t bother me at all, more bang for the buck. But Prepared and Mod drivers weren’t too happy about it as their cars are designed with 50-60 second courses in mind and they were running into mechanical difficulties because of the long courses. Plus you also run into things like more OCs, stupid high cone counts, more reruns.
Now if you had something else in mind I’m all ears. One thing that I wanted to do this year was to try to get more people to design the courses to get some fresh ideas.