The track layout was created to incorporate high speed sections so you can hit the rev limiter before entering a corner. Many of the seasoned racers frowned at the complicated layout since the figure eight section was very confusing at first.
Before the drivers meeting all of the drivers in run groups one and two have a half hour to walk the track. Everyone had their own way of doing this from riding a bike to simulating the car in the corner. My father and I just walked the course while holding the map and making sure we understood where each turn was. The biggest challenge for us was understanding how the slalom cones worked, there are two slaloms on the course; one at the top half and one in the middle. A vertical standing cone marks the spot of the turn and a horizontal cone marks the inside corner of the turn. It took us three runs to finally get the directions right, we kept missing one turn out of the four. If you turn on the wrong side it is an automatic DNF for that run.
The way the run groups work are like this:
The first group gets five timed runs and one fun run as a freebie since the track is coldest. When group one is racing on the track, group two must work as track workers holding the safety flags and replacing knocked down cones. The same applies to run groups three and four. Once each car is done with their allotted runs everybody switches from driving to working and vice versa.
My father had the first runs in the car, I was the navigator making sure that he saw each turn and guided him through the course. After his six runs we switched.
