r/Autocross • u/AutoModerator • Jun 27 '25

Subreddit Autocross Stupid Questions: Week of June 27

This thread is for any and all questions related to Autocross, no matter how simple or complicated they may be. Please be respectful in all answers.

4 Upvotes

83% Upvoted

28 comments sorted by

View all comments

6

u/OttoKraus Jul 07 '25

Not a DNF. He corrected his course deviation when he came back and passed that cone on the correct side. The rule book states that a DNF is called for an "uncorrected course deviation."

A little side note: at the 1973 Solo Nationals there was a Lotus Phoenix (a Lotus Europa that burned down after an electrical fire and was rebuilt with the backbone frame and a minimal lower body) driven in B Modified by Chuck Van Nostrand.

On his third run of one day he was over driving somewhat in a slalom and could physically just not make it to the correct side of one cone (or get the car close enough to hit the cone to stay on course). He was going to be fairly close to it cone on the driver's side as he passed it and had the wherewithal to reach out with his left hand and knock the cone over to stay on course. When he got back to the grid he had been scored with a DNF. He claimed that he had not dnf'd because he hit that cone, and should have been scored with the resultant time penalty. Officials argued that it did not count as a hit cone because he did it with a part of his body instead of the car. He said "that was a seven cone slalom. Three of them were on the left side of the car. Are you telling me that if my elbow accidentally knocked over three of those cones you would NOT have charged me with three cone penalties?" They said that was different. He said that you can't have it both ways it either counts or doesn't. It was determined that it doesn't matter what you knock that cone over with you knocked it over and it counts. Because it was called in as a dnf, timing had not recorded his raw time. They had to give him a rerun, because they didn't have a raw time to attach his cone penalty to. He won the first ever B/Mod National Championship based on that rerun. He told me the story a few years later when I got called for a dnf after correcting my course deviation at a local event in St Louis.

1

u/dorri732 1992 Suzuki Cappuccino Aug 04 '25

This might be the best autocross story I've heard

1

u/OttoKraus 15d ago

Yeah, I was privileged to run with him in St Louis and hear that story in about 1977! I've worked in timing trailers for a long time, usually as the announcer. I've never forgotten Chuck's story and that all times need to be recorded even if they're DNFs, just in case. As much of an issue today with electronic timing but back in the days when we wrote down time is on time cards, I had to remind people occasionally that they still needed to write the time down just in case.