Scca speedway motors cam challenge east

[Trackside-Suzy]

The CAM Challenge Heads East


First and foremost I want to state, for the record, that SCCA ‘gets’ the muscle car group and they are doing a bang-up job of incorporating it into their former turned-up-nosed, pinky-raised-sherry-drinking, Porsche-driving racers of SCCA past. SCCA recognized that they could increase membership with one simple act: stop shunning the muscle cars.

Not your turn this time little guys...


Our host Raleigh Boreen getting ready to run his new CAM car, purchased just so that he can do what he loves with this new class of drivers. For the record, I think he said he is building a first gen Camaro as well.

An enthusiastic SCCA member named Raleigh Boreen, was tasked with developing Solo membership. After speaking with some current members, Raleigh determined that he needed to investigate what Goodguys was doing and who was showing up at the USCA events. I first met Raleigh (who is from Indiana) out in Arizona at the Goodguys Shootout in the Desert event. After speaking with Raleigh and his most-friendly wife Velma, I couldn’t shake that these people were people I wanted to stay in touch with. In the Midwest it is often said “He/She never met a stranger” to describe an overly friendly and warm person. This aptly applies to Raleigh and Velma. I can only guess that this foreword in the SCCA guidelines is written by Raleigh as is evident by the exclamation point at the end.

APPENDIX B - CLASSIC AMERICAN MUSCLE (CAM) Rationale: The purpose of CAM is to attract automobile enthusiasts who are currently interested and/or participating in Goodguys®, Ultimate Street Car Association®, Pro‐Touring or other similar events for “classic” vehicles manufactured in North America by “The Big Three” based in the US (GM, Ford, and Chrysler). These avid enthusiasts would largely be a new and different group to join us as SCCA® members and participants. Regions are encouraged to offer this program and encourage Classic American Muscle car enthusiasts to join the fun at your SCCA Solo® events!

Everything "fits" in CAM class!

After a little bit of research, (asking anyone and everyone in the pits at Goodguys) Raleigh realized that if he was going to attract the muscle cars he was going to need to streamline the process and give as much seat time as possible. Muscle car guys don’t have a lot of willingness to read through rule books and sort out class distinctions; something SCCA is generally riddled with.

Within CAM there are three classes, Traditional, Classic and Sport. That is all.

CAM‐T (Traditional) (body styles originating from 1954‐72)
Wheelbase, minimum (inches).......................................... .................................................. .... 108
Weight, minimum (lbs.)............................................ .................................................. .............3000

CAM‐C (Contemporary) (body styles originating from 1978‐on)
Wheelbase, minimum (inches).......................................... .................................................. .. 100
Weight, minimum (lbs.)............................................ .................................................. ...........3000

CAM‐S (Sports)
Seating originally for 2 or more adults
Wheelbase, minimum (inches).......................................... .................................................. .....90
Weight, minimum (lbs.)............................................ .................................................. ...........2350
Weight, minimum (lbs.) w/ Lexan® windshield .................................................. ..................2500

As you can see, gone are the restrictions around every last nut and bolt!




Now, drawing a crowd of muscle cars to the regular weekend race day was a challenge because most of us muscle car people had already encountered the stink-eye and glare of a few too many BMW and Miata drivers upon arrival at a regional SCCA event. What to do to get people to know about SCCA and the CAM class?

Create an event! Speedway Motors joins the party and the CAM Challenge is hatched. Sponsorship is great. Sponsorship that comes with Al Jr. and Robby Unser is gold.



Fast forward to CAM Challenge East (after a pretty successful event out in California at Crow’s Landing) and low and behold there are almost 100 drivers with over 70 cars all lined up and ready to take on any seat time they can get, on a dilapidated airport runway in a god-forsaken part of Northern Indiana. We had long-time SCCA drivers who had strayed from the tribe to pursue the muscle car scene (Mary Pozzi for example [Brian Hobaugh and Mike Maier participated in the California event –both long-time SCCA guys] drove across the country.) and we had veteran current SCCA champions abandoning their Beemers for the weekend and begging friends and family with class-qualifying cars to let them race in this event. Moreover, we had majority of the CAM-T class that were Goodguys regulars who rarely or never had run in SCCA before.





Participants came from far and wide, joining Mary Pozzi’s long haul was Dave Nutting who cruised his G-Body down from Boston, Massachusetts (fretting about no cig lighter to charge a GPS and using a paper map… this seems fitting to me considering the car he was driving… I jest.), folks from Florida and then the usual suspects from all over the Mid West.





Several of the cars and drivers arrived on Thursday to participate in a test and tune mini course, get tech’d early and generally just shoot the bull on Friday. By Saturday the grid was in full force and the racing started on time and continued until every driver got six runs.

This event is a two-day event with winners on both days. Saturday would be three runs in the morning and three runs in the afternoon with your overall placement based upon the sum of your fastest two runs. Sunday would continue on the same course but this time drivers would get three runs and then the top 35 were chosen (varying numbers for each class based upon how many cars were in the class) for a shoot-out. Each of the three class shoot-outs resulted in one car from each class running against each other in the final round.







While I’m not a fan of the shootout for many reasons, SCCA somehow made it not so bad. First and foremost, I’m not a fan of the shootout because it usually means that the first round includes the match-ups of slowest against fastest – this just doesn’t seem fair in my book. And, I know what you’re thinking: “The fast guy can always hit a cone!” Not in this case, these were the best-of-the-best and they weren’t hitting any stinkin’ cones. Now for me personally, this meant that I (after somehow miraculously getting into the finals) was paired up with none other than Al Unser Jr. I think we all know I didn’t stand a snowball’s chance in hell of getting through that round. But, I took my two runs (one of my fastest and the other, my only cone-slaughtering run) and drove back to the pits with no less of a smile on my face.

Back to Saturday: We all thought that we had a chance for greatness (illusions of grandeur in the shadows of Mary Pozzi, Al Jr. and Robby Unser, etc.) in the CAM-T class until Kyle Tucker showed up around 4:00pm. Little did we know that he had brought along a 12 year old ringer. Okay, he’s 18 or something like that; everyone is 12 when you’re my age. Cody Mason (son of Brian Mason, your smiling autocross host and track designer at USCA meets) and his man-bun entered the pit and after talk of “I’ve never driven a big car like this; I have no idea how I’m going to do with all of this horsepower…” yadda-yadda, the kid kicked our collective asses. Cody even beat Kyle in his own dang car! It wasn’t enough to run the fastest times, the kid was (is) nice! Cody almost seemed to shy away from the fanfare. Until Al Unser Jr. asked for an autograph then I think he about melted.



On to Sunday’s competition and the threat of rain: A few cars dropped off but most of the same field was still in place to compete. (On a side note: the pits were EXTREMELY well organized grids that ran smoother than any event I’ve ever attended.) We churned through all three classes in record time with each driver getting three runs. Starting at 8:00am, the qualifying rounds were done before 10:00am and the final shoot-out ladder was in place by around 10:30am. Just before noon the rain started coming down for real (not bad, just started staying on the pavement) and the final rounds slowed down a bit with traction being what it is on a rubber-laden warm track.








Finals, awards and pack-up and we were home to Middle Tennessee by 8:30pm – barely dark.


All-in-all, I didn’t speak with one participant who felt like this wasn’t one of their now-favorite racing events. Even Mary Pozzi who came out from California said that she would definitely be back. The Unser’s had smiles on their faces all weekend and the group as a whole showed that the spirit of muscle car autocrossing can definitely be absorbed into SCCA and benefit both groups. I heard a veteran SCCA guy saying “Man, these muscle cars are a ton of fun! And so are the people!”






If you have a pro-touring car and you want more seat time, look for an SCCA event near you; I think you’ll find that you actually enjoy it.



FULL GALLERY HERE: http://s385.photobucket.com/user/pro...ast%20Part%202