Wednesday, March 1, 2023

South Coast Gator Nationals Review - NOLA Motorsports Park 2023

 This was a NEW venue for the South Coast Gator Nationals at NOLA Motorsports Park for 2023. We didn't know if this would work here since this is a motor course park with very nice settings for the winter months outside of New Orleans. 

They do have a mile straightaway on their road course which we used for 1/8 mile No-prep Street Drags and a very large concrete area for a car/truck show among many other activities including food trucks and drinks.



Plenty of room to grow for other activities which includes a offload 4x4 course and pulling track (currently being developed). They have a pro go-cart course along with a drifting pad for more activities including motorsports.

Now we just need to figure out how to adapt this to our Motorsports activities! Let's start with a Car/Truck/Jeep show, there is plenty of room to display plus park the fans. We had over 40 vehicles displaying some really nice vehicles including a couple of Street Outlaw cars. A local NO Corvette club took the honors of having the most entries. 

The track provided some nice food trucks with local NOLA food along with local drinks. Some nice motorsports vendors provided some great give-aways for the kids and adults. 

DIESEL Motorsports had to bring a portable lighting system in for the mile long straightaway of the road course. We setup in the on strait which is about 2-300 feet long and measured out about an 1/8 of a mile for a short drag strip. This provided a great no prep surface with no surface prep at the starting line. 

Most of the vehicles had no problems getting plenty of traction and getting up to speed on the track. We ran ET Bracket, 7.70 Index and heads-up racing on a Pro-tree. It took some testing and setup to finally getting it to work but the competitors had some fun running on this track that had not been used as a drag strip for many years. An experience for not only us but also the track.

It was a beautiful setting with great weather as they were getting an ice storm/snow in most of the Midwest states where we came from the past week. I believe it was sunny and almost 80 degrees most of the day. As always after the event you had many choices of great restaurants or travel 15 minutes and go to Bourbon street for some great sites.

Before we headed out of town we took the opportunity to stop off at the National WWII Museum downtown. It was unbelievable to view some items there including the original designer who was giving tours of the assault beach craft used on the Pacific Islands during WWII.

Our next event is just outside of Kansas City where the original WWI Museum is located and is a favorite of mine to take people to when they come to town. 

Photos of this past weekend's event can be seen at this link:

https://www.facebook.com/media/set?vanity=DIESELMotorsports.US&set=a.573378024823650