Thank you again to those that attended SVRA at Mid-Ohio over the weekend. Our numbers were up about 10% from last years event. It was a great event. I had a lot of fun. It was nice seeing a lot of familiar faces that I haven't seen in a while. It was pretty much a laid back weekend for most. Not a lot of activity but a lot of nice looking cars running around over the three days. 

Overall the flag work was very good and the communications were very good. The biggest issues were knowing the priority of call and radio silence. These items did improve through out the weekend. 

Again we struggled with inconsistent radios. I was able to spend time with Mid-Ohio on Sunday to further discuss the issues. Rest assured that Mid-Ohio is working on a plan to replace the radios. We may have the opportunity to test a system within the next month. Please remain patient, we are working on resolving the issue.

We had or first LEC school of the season which was attended by 5 new workers. Since we had the available numbers, we were able to do a classroom session prior to them going out on course in the afternoon at 1B. Sunday they worked on their skills at Turn 6. I was able to see the progress in a short period of time. "Professor" Avendutti did an excellent job in preparing the new recruits for the adventures that lie ahead. 

The new students were
Cody Crowe
Cynthia Harned
Rick Zellner
Siera Hayes 
Kristy Worthington

We also had our 1st Annual LEC reunion during the weekend. We had many past members join us during various times throughout the weekend. For me, it was the first time I was able to meet some of our history. Friday night we had dinner at the Skirmant's paddock area, where we enjoyed brats for dinner. Again, many thanks for your hospitality. Saturday, we spent time around the campfire discussing LEC history and telling stories of the past. Thanks to Randy Holton for your effort in putting this together. If you have pictures to share from the reunion, please email them to me and I will post them.

Thank you to Mike Wheeler and Matt Moritz for helping keep everyone stocked with plenty of ice and water.

Thank you to Chris Zemka for bring us breakfast that consisted of a breakfast casserole and coffee cake. It was enjoyed by everyone. I know it was delicious.

Dale Strimple provided some door prizes for our workers....Thanks Dale.

I really hope this is our turning point in getting LEC back to where it once was. The board and myself are working hard to do so. I know I speak for the other Board members and THANK YOU ALL for your support to this point. I hope you see and feel the difference and will be willing to participate more through out the rest of the year. Our season is very compact again with 85% of our events are from now until Mid-August.

I was able to speak to Mid-Ohio about some other items regarding port-o-pots, cross overs and a few other items. Our relationship with Mid-Ohio is getting better every weekend. We are working together instead of against each other. Mid-Ohio is very pleased with our progress in growing ourselves. 

Look forward to seeing you again soon!!!!

​Bill

With one of the few off weekends in the LEC schedule several LEC members made the journey to Indianapolis Motor Speedway for the 3rd SVRA Brickyard Vintage Invitational. It was a long 5 day event for many. There were many unique cars that we don't see very often, while the car count was down to about 425 car, the action on track was exciting. Many during a couple of long breaks were able to roam the paddock and view these cars up close. This is truly becoming a unique event on the SVRA calendar. 

LEC members that attended the event at IMS:

Bill Armitage
Jerry Cabe
Lee Pfeiler
Lowell McClure
Steve Wajvoda
Bill Thompson
Kevin Young 
Stu Kerr
Ben Tyler
Ron Conrad
Tom Phillips
Tom Schreiber
Ron Long
Diane Tedeschi

​Thanks to Stu Kerr and Bill Armitage for sharing some of their photos from the week.

What a way to kick off the 2016 Lake Erie season with the OVR Majors. It was quite a weekend with about 420 cars....the largest field we have seen in a long time. We ended up having 38 people on Friday, 50 on Saturday and 45 on Sunday. I thank everyone that came out and worked this race. We needed everyone that came. We had many people travel in from distances to help us as well. We had travelers from Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Michigan, New Jersey, Kentucky and Indiana. Along with our regular LEC members join us there were several members we have not seen in many years come work corners again with us. 

The days were long and the rain for the most part stayed away but it got interesting when it did. The activity on track definitely kept everyone busy everywhere. However a special shout out goes to Turn 4/5/6 on Sunday....I haven't seen that much activity there in a long time but everyone did a great job keeping it sorted out. I believe most everyone had a good time, I did see a lot of smiles all weekend.

Overall everything went well we did many things right and somethings need to be improved upon. I felt our flag work was very good. We still need to remember the white flag rules for moving safety vehicles. White flag when they are moving on course and stationary.yellow when they are moving or stopped off course and waving yellow for stopped on course.

Communications on the other hand were generally good but we struggled Friday morning and Saturday afternoon while Sunday was very good. Early on we were missing course checks and struggling providing the proper information to race control. We were not being complete with our report. We improved steadily but when racing started on Saturday the "Wheels fell off".  This time we were not paying attention to the net and prioritizing our calls properly. Too many situations where calling spin and go's when we have a hot pull going on elsewhere on track. 

We did improve over the weekend on more detailed information on an incident location, what we need on the initial calls. The initial calls were very good all weekend.

I did spend time in Race Control listening and observing and some of our communications issues were caused by stewards asking for more information during critical points at times and sometime by some indecision but we all maintain our professionalism but I my plan is to sit down and talk to a couple of stewards and talk to them about procedures and see what we can do to improve them.

I am also aware of the radio headset issues that plagued us all weekend. I know it was frustrating at times but everyone again maintained their professionalism and made adjustments to overcome the problem. I have talked to Mid-Ohio about the issues and they are working on improving the situation. There should be improvements by SVRA.

We did a captains meeting Friday night and the feedback was very helpful....too bad the weather Saturday night didn't allow us to have one.

If I were to grade our performance over the weekend, I would give it a solid B.

I hope many of you will return soon. We have a busy schedule ahead of us and we can really use your support.  We have an LEC reunion planned SVRA weekend. We are planning on providing dinners Friday and Saturday night of SCCA Pro weekend and hope to prove to Mid-Ohio we are back during AMA Vintage. Our next SCCA club race is the OVR Double Regional July 16-17 and we are expecting around 250-300 cars for that event.

​Also....Mid-Ohio is looking for workers for Dart KArt/WKA June 17-19. This is a pay day weekend. If you would like to help out, please email me at [email protected]

Hope to see you soon!!!!

​Bill

You know the racing season is kicking off when the sounds off IndyCars hit the track at the World's Greatest Race Course....Indianapolis Motor Speedway. For the 3rd year the month was kicked off by a road race at the famed oval. With the rain gods teasing us for most of the weekend, we lucked out except for about 30 minutes at the end of the day on Thursday. It was warm all week except for Saturday, where someone left the A/C on high....it was very cold but with the help of USAC and IndyCar we were able to make a tough situation a little more bearable. The weekend for the most part was uneventful except whenever I showed up at a station. I was fortunate to have several LEC members be a part of the team throughout the weekend. We ended up with 54 flaggers for the weekend and 14 of those were LEC members. The flagging and communication all weekend was strong and IndyCar was very pleased throughout the weekend. In addition, we may have been able to convince some of our newer flaggers and Indy to come over to Mid-Ohio to experience something different and continue your their training to be top notch flaggers. Despite the changing conditions everyone seemed to have a good time. Look forward to SVRA back at the Speedway in June.

Thanks to Stu Kerr for sharing some photos from Indy.

 For those that were not able to make the annual Lake Erie seminar and safety days you missed out on a fun and educational weekend. I was humbled by the amount of people that joined us through out the weekend. To be honest, I wasn't sure what to expect in the weeks leading up to this weekend and I was impressed by the support shown. I truly believe we have the ship stabilized and pointed in the right direction. I hope many of you feel the same way. We still have lots of work to do still but we will get it there. 

First of thank you to our board members Kurt Stevens, Erik Avendutti, Brad Morris, Kevin Young and Ron Long for attending the seminar this weekend. Bill Crowe is our other board member who could not be in attendance was missed but your efforts in the planning were definitely felt.

A special thanks to LEC Secretary, Diane Tedeschi for helping me with a lot of the leg work for locating and organizing the dinner, lunch and the other tedious tasks she took on for me. 

Thank You to Helga Klein and Mike Quaintance of the Mid Ohio Safety Team for coming in a talking to us about what they need when they are responding to an incident.
​
Thank you to Mid-Ohio Sports Car Course for allowing us to use the facility to hold our meeting and participate in the safety day along side your Safety Team.

The seminar went very well. We went over LEC business updating everyone where we stand and released our schedule...which will be updated shortly. Mid-Ohio provided some updates to the facility and some of the changes to the fencing leading up to the keyhole and through Thunder Valley. We had an SCCA update, going through the Concussion Protocol and the Majors race coming up in June (465 Cars currently).

We did a reboot on basic training reviewing flagging, communication and response protocols.

Sunday was a lot of fun with Fire, First Response and Rollover training. The afternoon was spent out on course with the Safety Team running through scenarios on response emphasizing proper flagging and communication techniques. Everyone went home tired for sure. 

We ended up with 7 new members of Lake Erie Communications. 3 familiar friends from Michigan but 4 true rookies. 

I hope to see everyone out at the track this season.....especially for the Majors....We need to have a strong presence. 

Keep coming back to the website often for updates as well as our Facebook page.

Looking forward to a strong 2016 season

Bill

The return of the Lake Erie Communications website. I hope you like our return. This is the first phase of the website is to provide something functional to see what event we have coming up and to be able to register for them as well. The monthly Communicator newsletter will be posted here. Any information or updates leading up to our events will be posted here. We will have a blog to share our stories from our weekends at Mid-Ohio to our members traveling to  other motor sports events around the world.