Mother nature blessed us with two perfect days of weather at Picton’s Base 31 airfield, this past weekend, with low humidity, light clouds and glorious sunshine .  It was, therefore, no surprise that we had a full house of auto crossers with 92 cars registered on Saturday and 67 on Sunday. Participants travelled from as far as Quebec City and there were many regulars who made the trek from Western Ontario and the GTA.    The Ottawa and Gatineau regions were very well represented by all our friends from MCO. Not to mention our own local members who participated in the very competitive slalom.

Having now run the Picton event for several years, the event schedule, and registration, is a well-oiled machine with St. LAC providing the infrastructure and the CASC team setting the course and taking on the complicated task of timing as three cars run on the course at one time. Upon arrival it was immediately noticeable that the new management at Base 31 are well on their way to creating a unique destination for event tourism.  It was a weird juxtaposition to be setting up the course on Friday night with an orchestra setting up to play in their newly renovated Drill Hall while our guests unloaded their cars and set up camp in the new camping area.   This new camping space is adjoined by a new beer garden patio with air-conditioned portable toilets available for our use.   The only complaints we had was the lack of a dedicated fire pit so that’s something we can work on for added ambiance next year.

 A quick shout-out to all the St. LAC volunteers this year –Rob, Andrew, Jordan, Paul and Dan for all their help with humping cones, packing and unpacking tents, extinguishers, flags and lots of bottled water.  There are a lot of moving parts that go into the weekend and the huge amount of positive comments from participants makes the effort all worthwhile.

With the exception of several small sections of pavement coming unstuck in an acceleration zone the weekend ran seamlessly. I will now hand it over to Dan to fill in some details on the competition itself as he was driving and had a much closer to the action seat. Enjoy the photos and the video links as we are very lucky to be able to use such an awesome venue.

All the best, DC