I'll start by apologizing for the crappy phone pictures. It was 95% operator error and 5% the phone. My Nokia takes good pictures when it's being used by someone who isn't a donkey.

So I was in Ohio last weekend they had SCCA Regional races going on ... Everything from Formula Atlantic to beat up old Honda Civic hatches were racing across a variety of classes.

There were seven groups racing comprised of full-on race cars like the Formula Atlantic (which looks like a CART open-wheeled racer) to Formula Vee (Based on Beetle engines from the 60s), GT1s such as the Viper ACRX, 80s American cars like the Camaro and Mustang, a Spec Miata race, and a variety of imports in varying stages of race prepped configurations.

I have some pictures, obviously.

Here they are:

Formula Vee: This series dates back quite a long way though I don't know if the chassis are still being made. I would say that this was my favorite car of the weekend because of the vintage nature of the racing and how it seemed the barrier to entry was low because of how simple they were.



Spec Racer Ford:

This is a spec-race which means that all the cars have to conform to specific configurations. The engines might even be sealed, though I'm not sure. It was a very competitive series where you could tell the good drivers from the average ones.



Formula 500:

The weirdest sounding and yet most intriguing racers of the weekend. They use a 500cc snowmobile engine and a CVT. So it sounds like a bunch of angry bees without any gear changes. Think of what a gas R/C airplane sounds like and you're pretty close. They can be driven really hard and are really quite forgiving. In the race that these were in, the top two Formula 500 cars were smoking Formula Continentals, which is basically a Formula Ford car without a rear wing ...



C Sports Racer:

This is a class that ran against Formula Atlantics and some competed very closely. They are purpose built race cars with engines that sounded like they were doing well in excess of 10,000 RPM. They seem to have weight and engine restrictions but otherwise anything goes.



The Sports 2000 series are open-cockpit and rear engine OHC Ford-engine race cars. This guy one his group as the fastest S2. He still wasn't even close to competitive with the CSRs and Formula Atlantics.



Some of the interesting cars I saw in other series that I didn't photograph were a Alfa Romeo Montreal, a Honda Fit (yes), a 4G Acura TL (really surprised me), a couple of Lotus Super 7s, two Sunbeam Tigers, and a early-90s Prelude that smoked his race. Was probably 6-7 seconds faster than the second place car, and at least 15 seconds faster than anything else on the track. I don't know if it was an Si or not but it was in the EP class (which is the highest in that Production race) so if I had to guess, I would have said it was a Si.

You can see the elevation change in the first photo, as they get up to the top of that elevation it turns sharply left and drops down probably 30 feet before another hairpin to the right.

More than one car carried too much speed over the rise and ended up in the grass on the other side of the track as their back ends broke loose.

The weather was decent and it was a lot of fun. Next time, I'm bringing my DSLR.

 

Cool stuff. Thanks for posting up the pics.

 

Your potato needs a zoom feature.

 

It has one but I didn't use it because software zoom normally sucks. Honestly, I've never used a phone to capture race cars before so I'm lucky I didn't end up with 50 pictures of Mr. Blurrycam

 

 

Thanks for the pics! Makes me want to go out to track weekends more often.

 

Nice. I like going to races/events like that.

 

That's really neat. Thanks for sharing.

 

Nice pics! Makes me want to pic up a Formula 500 myself. I've heard they're not much more expensive then the karts I race. May have to look into it

 

I think I read new ones are about $10k. Used seem to be $6-7,000.

And they seem like a hell of a lot of fun too.

 

Yeah, did some quick digging and saw some used ones for about that range. Just about where we are for karts in our class. My guess is operating expenses are a lot higher though. They do look like tons of fun!