History

The story of how it all started......

Mirror Khana -- an autocross without clocks
by
Rocky Entriken

I ran my first autocross in 1965, driving my brother Buck’s MGA in an event on Long Island, New York, while visiting him during a summer vacation between college semesters at the University of Kansas. I returned to Lawrence and before the year was out I had bought a 2-year-old Triumph Spitfire and by the next spring I was making weekly trips to Kansas City for autocross events there.

One such trip around 1968 was to the Ford plant in Claycomo, Mo, where the Midwest Mustang-Falcon Club put on an event it called the Mirror Khana. Even had a dash plaque with a tiny mirror glued on it. Great concept, but not that great an event. The single-elimination format meant I got one run that day.

The concept was pretty simple: Two cars line up on a course with two parallel straights. The ends of the straights were connected with all the twisty parts that make up an autocross course. One car’s starting line was halfway around for the other car. Both cars start together but each going the opposite direction, first one back to its own starting line wins.

Like a drag race it was set up as elimination brackets. Single-elimination meant half the entry got just one run. Of course, I was among that half, but I did get notice for most entertaining spin. Heading for the final turn I could see my opponent was ahead. The 70,000-mile Michelin X tires on the bone-stock Spitfire were not the ideal autocross rubber anyway and they had no hope of holding the corner I was attempting -- the spin went a full 720 degrees.

To the best of my knowledge, MMFC never attempted a second Mirror Khana, but I always remembered that event as one of the most intriguing I’d ever run, but disappointing in not getting the customary 3 or more runs of the typical Sunday autocross.

Fast-forward to 1974. I’ve finished college, moved to Salina, Ks., and become gainfully employed at the local newspaper, been a member of SCCA for some three years and was now the RE of Kansas Region. My brother has moved to Lawrence, got a job as a mechanic for the fellow from whom I’d bought the Spitfire. Buck had built it into a race car and raced it three years, qualifying it for the Runoffs twice, and in 1974 I reclaimed it. Yes, that’s the same Spitfire I’m competing today.

We had a site in Salina that used to be the Municipal Airport, a mile of concrete 150 feet wide. Salina Region still runs there today on the third-mile left untouched by the city primarily for events such as ours (the northern two-thirds now is ballfields). I remembered that Mirror Khana and decided I wanted to try to do one, but fix the disappointments of that event in Kansas City several years before.

The first part of the fix was to make it a double elimination event, which meant a minimum two runs for everyone. But that still wasn’t enough. So the second part was to add something unheard of in autocross -- practice. Everyone got two practice runs, one from each start line, also getting used to a ready-go start virtually identical to what you see these days on the Speed Channel show “Pinks.”

I drew a course that ran about 75 seconds for a full-loop lap. With the improvements to cars over the years, run times got down to where the occasional run under 60 seconds was turned in. Times, of course, were unofficial -- we didn’t use clocks except on the occasional match pairing co-drivers.

A single finish line crossed the runway with a straightaway going up each side. The cars actually started about 40 feet behind the finish line just so the drivers could easily see the starter standing between them. At the “Go!” signal, both took off, one going north the other south. The southbound driver first encountered a chicane that was not quite open enough to take flat out, and then he hit a six-cone slalom spaced 60 feet apart. In 1974 a 60-foot slalom was considered wide open (rulebook minimum then was 25 feet!) and in my Spitfire I was usually in third gear. At the far end a 90-degree left went to a quarter-circle sweep and then a pair of lane changes, then the turn that came to be called “The Elbow.” Fast entry and shut down fir a fairly sharp left hook then sweep onto the northbound straight.

As you came onto the straight you could look up and see your opponent -- like looking in a mirror. Was he at the final turn yet? Which of you would be first to the finish line? But there was still half the course to go.

Beside the runway was a taxiway 50 feet wide. Two diagonal crossovers created a triangle of grass. The end of the northbound straight veered onto the first crossover, about a 120-degree sweeper, and then up the taxiway headed south again briefly before a hairpin turn. Pointed north again, alongside the triangle the course shifted from the left side of the taxiway to the right -- “You take that turn on faith,” said one competitor. Then another 120-degree turn back across the runway, a squared-off box turn and onto the straight again to the finish.

It was the same course every year -- another concept foreign to autocross -- so people learned to drive it. That “turn on faith” could be driven flat out in most cars but drivers had to be precise. The rules of the day mandated a gate width minimum of 10 feet and the Mirror Khana gates were mostly 10 to 12 feet wide. Later, when SCCA’s rulebook widened the minimum width to 15 feet, competitors were asked if we should widen the course. Virtually unanimous the answer was no -- “it would change the character of the event,” they said.

With no clocks one immediate question was, what to do about pylons? The answer became the “three for free” rule. You could hit up to three cones without penalty, the fourth was a DNF -- but if one driver hit four and the other hit five (more frequent than you might think!) the guy with four won the pairing. Key corners were double-coned. The event had run several years before someone figured they could take out the two cones in The Elbow with the right side of the car and fly through that lefthander virtually no-lift. A third cone there put a stop to that. Still, strategies of which cones to hit became part of the event sometimes with humorous consequences when intentional conicide collected more victims than expected.

At the outset it was decided at minimum two cars would make a class, invoking the Appendix B bump rule in the SCCA Solo Rules. Later it became three cars because so often a two-car class would request to be bumped -- larger classes meant a chance for more runs. Finally we began bumping 3-car classes automatically.

The first brackets were a standard 16-car drag race bracket with all the empty slots given byes. It took only a couple of events to realize that using that meant about half the runs were bye runs, so a custom set of brackets was created for every possible combination from 2 cars to 16 with the result that six byes, run in pairs, were the most that would happen. The brackets also were random in that they were filled in order of entry receipt, and automatically separated co-drivers with consecutive numbers. They might meet, but never in the first round. When they did, the runs were hand-timed with a stopwatch that started with the drop of the starter’s hand. In regular pairings, the finish was determined by two judges standing outside the course. They had to agree without consultation or the match was ruled a dead heat and rerun -- which did not happen all that often. Just enough to be fun and interesting, but not so much as to be a significant event delay.

The first four Mirror Khanas were one-day events -- practice in the morning and competition in the afternoon, but the word was spreading. The first one had about 40 cars (and remember, there were only about 15 classes then!). The entry nearly doubled in four years and it went to a two-day format -- practice Saturday and competition Sunday. In the early ‘80s the three Regions in Kansas then (Kansas, Kansas City and Wichita) created a Kansas State Solo Championship and the Mirror Khana became its keystone event. Entry surged past 100 cars with a peak the year it hit 129. We chased the sun over the horizon to get done that day, and this was in June near the longest day of the year.

Autocross in the ’60s was largely a local sport primarily governed by sports car councils. SCCA then was a minor player. In the ’70s the SCCA influence, driven by the creation of the Nationals, began to take hold. By the ’80s the concept of driving 3-4 hours to do an autocross was no longer strange and by the ’90s a Divisional Championship series reaching the length of the Midwest Division put an end to the Kansas State championship.

I put on 30 Mirror Khanas -- the first one in 1974 and then every year from 1976 through 2004. In later years the concept was copied -- sometimes modified to fit local preferences -- by several other Regions. Even ProSolo, when that event was originally invented by Bill Johnson, was based on Mirror Khana. However Johnson had only heard of the event, he never saw it run, so he assumed “Mirror” meant mirror-image courses. I like to think that with the Atlanta Region’s Doublecross event, SCCA is finally getting it right!