Re: Nats Virgins : Your Thoughts/Comment Here
i hate myself for missing out, but i think it has to do alot with the region for people to have eassy acces to it. if 60 trucks showed up and if that's more than a avavage nats, than i think you got a good spot there.
That right there says a lot for the location. If in previous years its been hard to hit 50 trucks, and we had 60 trucks, then that speaks for itself. The economy isnt in the greatest shape, people arent going out and spending as much money, so for us to have a bigger than average turnout when less people are actually traveling really says something for the event.
But everybody was afraid of tech inspection at the track.
That was another huge plus. I didnt even get my hood open and i was passed tech. I wasnt worried about anything other than not having a cage in the truck, but still It would really really suck if someone drove that far and was not allowed to race over a technicality. Plus i guess they figure the group is there for these trucks so they probably take care of them.
There is a backway to 65 that we need to use if we do it again. I got stuck on 231 traffic and my truck was not a happy camper doing it.
Yea I thought all of those stop lights on the way to Ryans were going to do me in. My truck was already still waaay hot from the track, and that fuel pump sounded like it was going to come through the floor by the time we got there. Of course if it wasnt 100 degrees out that wouldnt have been near as much of an issue.
To respond to some of the concerns...
I personally pushed for a summer time date so that more people (college kids, families w/ children in school, etc) could make it to the event. I'd rather have a big turnout and some heat, than a small turnout and ideal track temps.
Ryan's was convenient, thus I booked the back room. It was either there or a chinese buffet...i chose Ryan's since i felt more confident that everyone couldn't find something they'd want to eat there moreso than a chinese buffet.
Timing is impossible to gauge until the actual event is going. Everything takes longer to setup/execute than you want to imagine, and it just postpones things. We did almost everything on the packed schedule. There are a few minor details that were overlooked that i would have liked to have forced to occur, but just didn't have the ability to do everything since we were already fighting time constraints as it was. I really think that any more in the schedule would have been too much. This is why we scrapped the poker run and parking lot races. That was all 'for fun' stuff anyway, and i don't think anyone was lacking in the fun department.
All very valid reasons. You know you cant please everyone all the time, you guys got just about as close as your gonna get though. Like was said before, the weekend flies by, hell it flies by when your at home not doing anything. To get all of that activity organized and actually executed inside of a 2 day period has got to be damn near impossible.
The only thing that you could do is actually make Thursday part of the trip and have some sort of activity for those of us that make it there then. I was suprised with the number of trucks that were sitting in the parking lot Thursday night, so maybe we could have a Thursday night event of some sort. Of course hanging out in the parking lot and meeting new people Thursday night was almost an event in itself!
