I did it in '91 at Charlotte. There were about 500 people vying for a chance to go to Australia as one of the 25 people who scored the highest. After a week in Oz, the person clocking the fastest lap time won a five race package down under.
The format was a 15 lap check ride/warm-up, followed by two scored five lap sessions in two different cars. Turns one and two had markers painted (I think you can still see them!) that were the width of the tire track plus an extra six inches on each side. The scoring was fairly simple: the average lap speed was multiplied by the number of paired markers that the driver stayed between (total of twenty possible per lap). They then multiplied that by some other number to get the final score.
For all the session, we followed a pace car that kept an eye on us for safety. I had Barry Graham as pace driver and by the end I could see that he was pushing his car pretty hard to stay ahead of me, leaving light gray lines as we went through the corners. Quite a thrill! He had a grin that almost matched mine!
I was one of eleven drivers out of the 500 that completed all my scored laps above 145 mph average. Easy to tell, as they used 145 mph as a cutoff; no bonus for going faster than that! My lap speeds were all right around the 150 mark with my best at 150.544 mph and a lap time of 35.92 seconds. That was about 2 1/2 seconds off qualifying for a Cup race at the time; not too bad considering the car had a rev limiter set at 6800 rpm (about 170mph top speed), the tires were old and hard and the track was cold.
It's too bad they didn't use lap times as the criterium for going to Australia, as my best time was the second fastest for that year. Oh well, still a lot of fun even if the world missed out on another driving great. No, I didn't make the cut.
Flash forward twenty years: last summer my former boss at the old race shop invited me out to sample his latest obsession, a winged alcohol Sprint car - 3 lbs per hp! I did about ten laps on a 1/2 mile dirt oval for $50! Now that's cheap racing!
