Arena Racing!

What is Arena Racing? It is auto racing with small cars on a banked track inside on an area about the size of a hockey rink.

Now the longer answer. On saturday night, I went with a coworker to the Hampton Coloseum to watch Arena Racing.

The track is 0.1 miles long and is a portable banked track that is made of aluminum. The surface is roughned and coated with some sticky black coating.

The cars are approximately 1/2 the size of a NASCAR stock car. They are 9 feet long and weigh about 750 pounds. They are built with a full cage and a fiberglass shell. The engine is a 13hp Honda generator engine mounted in the rear. The driver sits in the middle of the car and enters thru a hatch in the top. The driver wears a helmet and full head, neck and arm restraints. The cars are fitted with transponders to record lap and finishing positions. Nothing could be changed or modifyed except the suspension alignment could be adjusted. All the cars are from the same builder.

During racing, these cars go about 55 miles an hourand turn lap speeds of around 10 seconds. A typical race is 50 laps. No pitting is needed and repairs are actually performed by the officials!

The racing was wild. There were three preliminary races and a final event. There must have been qualifying during the day. Each prelim had between 10 and 12 cars. The top four were tken from race "B" and "C" and 6 from race "A" for 14 total for the final race. Starting positions for the final were drawn from a hat.

These guys really are agressive. Two and three wide was common. Just like the big cars, you could see the effect of tires wearing out and loose cars hitting the wall. There were lots of chrashes.
Kind of funny because very little damage actually
seemed to occur. One car hit the wall so hard that the body behind the rear window was almost broken off. If the car will run, the officials will use lots of duct tape to hold the body together and send them out again. When one rolls over, two officials come out and roll the car upright and they seem to restart easily. One car rolled over in turn 4 skidded a ways on it's top, rolled upright and kept going without the engine dying. Hitting the wall was a resounding "WHAP"!

Lots of fun and glad I went!