For Driving Enthusiasts, Texas is a very nice place to be these days. We have year-round events, a terrific group running HPDEs, and several tracks.
The Drivers Edge (http://www.TheDriversEdge.net/) is the best HPDE group I've seen in my 28 years in this hobby. Thanks to the management of this group, a large body of experienced instructors, and it's "non-denominational" approach ("run what you brung" - meaning no snotty brand-centricity, as in the LSR PCA), high performance drivers education is doing very well in Texas these days. I'm proud to be an Instructor in this group (having abandoned the LSR PCA when their elitism got the better of them).
Texas is also doing very nicely for roadcourses these days: we have Texas World Speedway (TWS: the original, the best, and the fastest) in College Station, Texas Motor Speedway (TMS: for one event a year, with challenging banking on the NASCAR oval) outside of Fort Worth, Eagles Canyon near Decatur (a new track; our first event there is coming soon), and the very well-established and recently expanded Motorsport Ranch in Cresson. Also:
- there is another Motorsport Ranch facility near Houston, but design and management issues prevent it's use for these types of events.
- there was an announcement of a new facility named "Racers Ranch" to be located east of Dallas, but that project appears stalled and unable to get off the ground for the time being.
- and there was also a roadcourse in Corpus Cristi on the airstrip at the US Naval Base, however this has been closed to racers since 9/11 and may never reopen.
When I originally moved to Texas in 1989, TWS was in bankruptcy and there weren't any other roadcourses in the state. Now we have several open, and two more on top of these are also being discussed.
The brand new Harris Hill Road facility is nearly completion and is coming along very well. All paving is complete, and enough is there for a few test laps at slow speed. Follow the link above for more information.
Photos below show the Harris Hill Road pit area, and the general scope of the track. This is particularly nice for me - it's located practically in my own backyard.
In other types of events, we also have an Open Road event (in which we won our class in 2000: http://www.drivingenthusiast.net/sec-events/events-open-road/2000.04-bb/index.htm ), a measured mile event, and of course several SCCA regions running autocross events.
What we don't have in Texas is an established and continuing road rally program: a few groups such as the Miata Club and Texas A&M SportsCar Club run a (very) few events between them. A group in Dallas also ran a navigator's school once to my knowledge. What we need is a dedicated Rallymaster who will establish and run a continuing event. The best example I've seen of this is the "Discover America Rally": (http://www.rallywny.com/rallywny/DARflyer2007.htm ) in Western New York. I entered several Discover America events when I lived in that area back in the 70s and 80s. The husband and wife team who run them, Tom and Karen Krajewski, make a strong commitment to running the event every year. Running a rally means becoming intimately familiar with hundreds of back roads and their oddities and nuances (all the better for challenging route navigation) and driving them continuously in advance of the event. And it means dedicating probably a hundred hours of hard work towards it every year in order to make sure it comes off well, which, snowstorms allowing, it has for 30 years straight. These types of folks are hard to find... keeping them at it is even harder. I'm hoping somebody in Texas steps up to the plate one of these days - and that many of us make a commitment to help them run the events year after year.
