West Chapter Report – October 2016

On October 4, 2016 the West Chapter of the North Carolina Region of SCCA met for their October Meeting. This was the first meeting of the Chapter at a new and hopefully permanent meeting site. This site is at Coopers Ale House, which should sound familiar to anyone in the NCR, but the street address is about 2 miles away from the site we lost back in June of 2016. Over the last 4 months we met at three sites and changed our meeting night once. It appears that all of this chasing about has worked out well for us, as the new location seems to be all that we have ever sought in a place to get together. It is a larger, brighter, and easier to find location with room for us to expand our programs and proudly invite more of our friends and prospects to join us in more activities. The room we will be using has a built- in system for videos and other presentations.

The new location brought us back to a menu of delightful items that we had been accustomed to at prices that are more to our liking and the wait staff is familiar with most of us regulars. If anything has taken a step back, it is the beer menu is smaller, but we have been assured that this is being worked out. Remember, everything about this place is new to the staff also.

As soon as we all got served and started eating, we turned on a video of Rally cars from somewhere in a country where the language wasn’t English and the regard for life and limb seemed to be of lesser concern to the participants, both drivers and spectators, than here. Tim Lyons brought this for our enjoyment and we played it twice during dinner.

Our next activity consisted of our business portion of the meeting and the Chapter Coordinator provided a brief review of the Region’s affairs by quickly going over the minutes of the BOD meeting held in late September at Pipers Deli in Durham, NC. The business of the Region was fairly mundane and no hot issues needed any significant discussion and we were able to move quickly to our program.

Dwight Cooke provided our program for the evening, which consisted of showing a lengthy video from an event held by SVRA , a premier vintage organization. One of this group’s most popular annual events is their Watkins Glen GP Festival. To start off this event each year all of the cars entered in their races for the weekend are driven on the city streets from the racetrack to the center of town and parked there for a car show. 20, 000 or more local residents and visitors are allowed to look over the cars and talk to the drivers and racing teams and when the car show ends, the drivers are invited to go back to the race track by way of the original local roads that made up the 6 mile Gran Prix course in the early days of the US GP. Dwight was a passenger in the vintage Alfa Duetto owned by Charlotte, NC resident Ceasar Cone and the driver in the video was John Baucom, Trans Am driver and several time SCCA Runoffs Champion.

Dwight told us that the experience of participating in this event was the pinnacle motorsport experience in his life.

The attendance for the meeting was 28 which was more than 300% more than the meeting in September. The West Chapter meetings will be held at this new venue on the first Tuesday in the month. Any change will be posted on the NCRSCCA website. The Address to this new meeting place is 415 S. Swing Road, Greensboro, NC 27409-2011. The businesses involved with this address are Wyndham Garden Hotel and Coopers Ale House. We meet in the Jamestown Room which is in the Hotel portion of the complex and is to the left of the building. Park on the left side of the building and enter by the green canopy entrance and turn left at hallway and Jamestown room is immediately on right. Come at 6:30 to eat and by 7:30 to meet. Guest Speaker for Nov, 1 will be Tom Long.

Buddy Matthews, West Chapter Coordinator

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