Autocross June 13, 2009 – A Reflection

I was surprised by my performance in my first ever event, placing a respectable 3rd out of 5 in my class, but this second event really put me in my place. I ended up last in my class and second to last overall out of 39 drivers. I made all of the typical beginner mistakes, but I learned a few lessons along the way.

My first mistake was only finding time to walk the course one full time. I arrived early enough that I could have walked the course many times, but I didn’t want to get in the way of the people fine tuning the course. When I finally did start to walk the course everyone was told to move  off the course so they could do a test run. This left me with only enough time to do one full course walk before the drivers meeting. We did do a parade lap, a slow run of the course with all the cars going one right behind the next, but that wasn’t enough to keep me from going off course twice out of six runs. In hindsight I should have started walking the course much earlier in the morning. I would have liked to walk it at least three times.

The turn in the very top left corner was a time killer (and a tire killer) for me.

The second major beginner mistake I made was trying to go to fast in the slow parts of the course, and to slow in the fast parts. How many times have you heard that? This autocross was at a different venue then the first one I attended, and there was much more room at this one to pick up speed between turns. I wasn’t prepared for this so I ended up carrying way to much speed into some turns and way to little into others. Keeping a high speed coming out of the turns is critical to a fast time, and both entering a turn way to fast, and entering it way to slow lead to very slow exit speeds.

These mistakes cost me at least a second on my overall time. My fastest time of the day was a 76.425, which was 18.25 seconds slower than the fastest time of the day. I have decided the best way to see my improvements over time is to record how close I am to the fastest time of the day. If I just recorded how many seconds slower I was then my data would be skewed when we ran an especially long or short course, so the formula I plan to use is:

[(My  Fastest Time) - (Fastest Time of the Day)] / (Fastest Time of the Day)

So I was about 31% slower than the fastest time of the day. It will be interesting to see how this number changes (hopefully drops) over time.

After thinking about this event a little more and looking over the results again, I felt like I needed to add some things to this post. Here they are:

I was looking at my times after the event, and I realized that with an instructor in the car for three runs I was able to drop over three seconds off my overall time. I started thinking about why this was and I realized it was a combination of things.

First, he was constantly telling me where to be looking. This not only ensured I didn’t get lost on the course, but it helped me learn to look ahead on the course and not at the cone right in front of me. This affords you more time to setup for the next turn (or two).

Second, after each run he would pull out the course map and go over specifically which parts of the course I could have driven faster, and which parts I should have taken slower.

These are things that I can certainly learn to do myself, and they accounted for most of the three seconds I dropped off of my time. He did give me one more tip though. There was an almost constant radius turn and I was taking it too fast which led to the front tires losing grip and me understeering. To correct this I would slow way down. With the instructor in the car, when the front tires started losing grip he didn’t tell me to slow down, he told me to unwind the wheel a little bit. I was shocked how a little less turn-in with the wheel could allow the tires to regain traction so quickly. After the run he told me that I should always be using this technique to find the limits of the tires by bringing them up to the limits and as soon as they start to lose traction just unwind the wheel a little bit and then you know exactly how much grip you have and how hard you can turn-in. I didn’t think to try his technique of finding the limits, but just unwinding the wheel a bit when the car started to push saved me a bit of time on every subsequent run.