Goodguys Columbus - Friday Update!

[Ed.Capen]

If you have been at the Goodguys event in Columbus before this year it was hard to pick out the SMOTY and SROTY from the 300 plus cars in the Pro's Pick area. This is what made the changes for this year.

Goodguys decided to showcase the SMOTY and SROTY on Friday from 10am to 4pm this meant they would need to be in the area during that time and to have the SMOTY go through the AutoCross during that time. Goodguys decided to run the AutoCross just for Vendors and the SMOTY contendors. At Noon Goodguys decided to parade the SMOTY through the event and over to the AutoCross area for everyone to see and follow. Tech was done on the cars in the area. Some cars had no seat belts and one had loose wheel bearings. These items were all addressed and some cars could not run the coarse and were no longer eligible to compete.

The AutoCross time was from 9am to 4pm and if you were a SMOTY contender you had to run three laps. The laps were looked at by the judges for style points only and the fastest time did not matter. Before the final cars were going through the coarse the Nova of Troy's came over to tech and got inline to run the three laps. After the three laps the contenders could go back to the Pro's pick area or stay and run more laps to try and get the fast time to win a set of BFG tires. Roger Burman stayed and recieved the fast time with the 68 Camaro he built. The Nova that Troy built was over in the Pro's pick area after the AutoCross to receive the dot that showed he could compete on Saturday.

On Saturday the SROTY and SMOTY were once again seperated in the Pro's pick so everyone could see them together and there was no special parking allowed. All contestants had to be in the area by 10am and it was first come on the lineup. NO special treatment was given to anyone.

I think Goodguys did the best at making this fair, fun and interesting for all who were there to enjoy the weekend and a great show of the cars. The only thing that I can see that needs to be changed is that only the owner or builder can drive the car in the AutoCross so it remains fair for all.

For the first year with all this new stuff coming into play I would say it went pretty good and the best cars were part of the 27 cars that were involved right down to the end when the 5 top cars had to be picked.

I would hope that everyone builds cars to run the AutoCross and to be the best they can build like the 27 cars that showed up this year. Remember only one car is a winner!!!

I hope that this will clear up some of the discussions on this thread.