This was a well designed course; fun to drive and easy to follow. Notice there are two options for the slalom. All of the fast guys went to the left of the first cone, so I followed.

After overdriving the car at the last autocross, I knew this one should be all about getting the lines right. Before my runs I spent plenty of time studying the course and deciding exactly what line I wanted to take around every corner. I told myself that running the correct line was more important than trying to go fast, and it worked.

I had a much more experienced autocrosser riding with me and his first comment after my first run was that I didn’t have the bad habits most novices have. I wanted to tell him that just last month I had every bad habit imaginable, but I stayed quite while he told me where I could improve. He told me that my line wasn’t quite right in some places, for example on the first turn before the slalom I was hugging all the cones when I should have been driving away from them a bit in order to late apex the last one. He also told me I could drive the skid pad (the circle on the map) a lot faster. I had been driving it to keep the tires fairly quiet but he said that hearing a constant, but not to loud, squeal was a good thing. I took this to mean I shouldn’t worry as much about the noise the tires were making but instead think more about how I could feel the tires grabbing. When I could feel the front tires sliding I slowed down a little bit, if the tires were too quiet I sped up a little bit. His advice helped me drop 3.3 seconds from my first to my third run.

Somewhere on the course I found another ~.3 seconds on my sixth run, which allowed me to run a best time of 47.391. This puts me only 17.6% slower than fastest time of the day, which is great considering I was 21.2% off of fastest time of the day the last time the autocross was held at SPC.

My requirements for a helmet were simple. It should be reasonably comfortable, SA2005 certified, and cheap. The SA2005 certification is required for most autocrosses and track days. There are many cheaper helmets with M2005 certification but they are designed for motorcycles and aren’t testing against fire. For this reason many picky auto clubs won’t let you run with them.

I came across this Pyrotect open face helmet at apexperformance.net for $148.45 with free shipping which was about what I had seen similar helmets go for at other retailers, but this one was available in flat black and came with a helmet bag so I was sold. When I got to the checkout I was very surprised when I saw the option to skip the helmet bag and save $9.99. To stick with the plan of getting a cheap helmet I took this option.

After this lucky save I figured it was worth a search to try and find a discount code and save a little more money. It didn’t take much searching at all to turn up this thread on a BMW forum, where I found not only a coupon code for 10% off (BIMMERFORUM-10), but also a few happy customers with kind words for the folks at Apex Performance. This dropped my total down to $124.61, which is easily the cheapest SA2005 helmet I can find online.

For the price I paid, I feel I got a high quality helmet. I don’t have any experience with super expensive helmets, but I can say that this Pyrotect is much nicer than the loaners I was using. The padding is very thick, but comfortable. My ears slide in fine and they don’t get smooshed. The visor is neat, but I am not sure if it is functional. I think I’ll leave it on for a while. Overall this helmet gets an A+ and is recommended unconditionally.

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.

After watching the first groups times I set a very conservative time goal for myself of one minute. I figured this was a time I could easily get as long as I kept the car on the course. After my first run I was very excited to see a 54.086. I was lucky enough to have driven the course with a much more experienced autocrosser and after my first run he gave me some pointers that I hadn’t seen in any of the “Beginners Guide to Autocross” articles.

In the grid between runs

First, he told me I was holding the wheel wrong. I was driving with my left hand on the wheel at 12 o’ clock, and my right hand on the shifter. He told me that having both hands on the wheel allows you to make much smoother turns and keeps your right hand from accidentally pulling the car out of gear. 

Next, he told me I was using the clutch way to much. A habit I carried over from street driving was pushing in the clutch as I starting braking for a corner, and letting it out when I was ready to accelerate out of the corner. He told me that once I shifted into second gear to put my left leg on the dead pedal and keep it there. 

The next run I tried to put his tips into practice. I have driven many miles on the street with one hand on the steering wheel, so during my second run I caught myself many times with a hand on the shifter, but as soon as I noticed I moved my hand back to the wheel. I didn’t really notice any extra smoothness in my turns from this, but like I said I wasn’t really doing it right the whole time and it was only my first time trying it. In the future I will work to get myself in the habit of keeping both hands on the wheel during an autocross.

The second tip was much easier to remember and I definitely felt an improvement. Leaving the clutch out and the gear engaged allows for some engine braking during the fraction of a second where your foot is moving from the gas pedal to the brake pedal. The obvious benefit from this is that the car starts slowing down sooner, but I think the less obvious, but greater benefit is that it adds some smoothness to your braking. As you begin to brake for a turn, the car is already slowing down because of the engine braking, so when you slam on the brakes it is a little smoother than if you had slammed on the breaks while the car was just coasting in neutral or with the clutch in. Another benefit of this technique is that on corner exit, you don’t have to worry about letting the clutch out. You just roll on the throttle and go. This made the car feel much more responsive, and I believe this is a large part of the reason I cut almost a second off my first time and turned a 53.338 on my second run.

My next four times were 51.510, 51.862, 50.436+1, and 50.545 which allowed me to finish third out of five in my class. I was 40th out of 47 overall, and almost 9 seconds off the fastest time of the day, but I am definitely happy with my performance. 

Next month I want to focus on improving my course walking to make them more valuable. I want to start thinking about where people could get lost on this course, and make sure it doesn’t happen to me. I don’t mean “Do I turn left or right up here?” lost, because I was able to memorize the course enough to know which way to turn. I mean “Is the gate between these two cones or these two cones?” lost. There was a particular gate on this last course where probably ten cars went off course, and I had my car pointed at the wrong set of cones for a short time on every run. Thankfully I didn’t go off course, but I’m sure it cost me a fraction of a second.

Another thing I want to look out for during the course walk are the difficult turns. I spent a lot of time memorizing the locations of the sharp turns – the tight 90 and 180 degree turns. That certainly helped me prepare for those turns, but I was caught off guard by a few turns that seemed very open on the course map and during my course walks. I could have easily cut at least .5 seconds off of my time if I could have remembered where one or two of these tricky turns on the course were in time to prepare for them.

I had a great time autocrossing. My nerves settled down after about the second run, and it was really the most fun I have ever had in a car. I have already ordered a helmet and signed up for the next autocross on June 13.

This is a two part post. If you missed part 1 be sure to go back and check it out. 

• My First Autocross, Part 1

Autocross is a safe, fun way to push the limits of your car. Cones are setup to form a track, or more accurately a path, in a large paved area. The drivers are then timed as they race their cars through the course, one at a time. Drivers are penalized, usually by adding a second or two to their time, for each cone they hit. At the end of the day the driver with the shortest time wins. 

I had wanted to participate in an autocross for quite some time, but I was always worried about my capabilities, the capabilities of my car, and my age (I first learned about autocross now to long after I got my drivers license). It took trading my old car with an automatic transmission for an only slightly sportier Infiniti G20 with a manual 5-speed transmission for me to get the courage to sign up.

It just so happened one of the local autocross clubs was having their next autocross at a very local venue, so when I read on the clubs message board that they needed an extra hand setting up the course I was quick to volunteer. They assured me that even a first-time autocrosser would be helpful in setting up the cone course, and told me to plan to arrive at 7:00 sharp. 

I started preparing for the event the day before in order to allow myself to wake-up at a semi-reasonable time and make it there to help with setup. I filled a backpack with a camera, two towels, two water bottles, a tire pressure gauge, a course map and painters tape. I then went outside and inflated my tires a bit more than usual, because I had read that it helped the tire cope with the hard turns they would be taking on the autocross course.

Autocross course maps can be a little confusing to use for course setup.

I arrived at the law enforcement training pad where the autocross was being held just before 7:00. Trying to decide exactly where each cone should go in a paved area about the size of an average grocery store parking lot is not the simplest of tasks, but everyone was very friendly and I was reminded time and again that it didn’t have to be perfect. 

After finishing my section of the course, and setting up the grid (the area the cars sit right before their run) I went off have my car tech’ed. A technical inspection at an autocross is very basic. The inspectors are basically checking for anything lose inside the car or under the hood. As long as your wheels aren’t going to fall off and you left your floor mats at home you will probably pass. After a quick reminder that I couldn’t run with my backpack in my trunk I passed. 

Right before my technical inspection. I still needed to pop my hood before the inspector would come check the car.

After passing inspection I started walking the course. It is important to walk the course at least a few times before you drive it, or else you can easily get lost during your run and drive off the course. The first time you see all those cones setup, it is very intimidating to think that there is actually a path to follow. I was able to walk the course 3 times before the drivers meeting. 

The drivers meeting is just a short meeting to discuss how things will go throughout the day. The major focus is on safety, but work groups were also a major topic. With the F.A.S.T. autocross club, everyone who drives works. Your work assignment can be anything from chairman of the event, technical inspector, t0 just picking up cones if the cars knock them down. My job was helping with course setup.

After the drivers meeting there was a novice course walk, which is just an organized course walk where an experienced driver points out potential trouble areas on the course. I really enjoyed hearing tips from a more experienced (faster) driver, even though I wasn’t really able to put them good use. I will definitely take the novice course walk again, and in the future I hope to be skilled enough to take advantage of what I learn. 

I got out of picking up cones during the first set of runs by volunteering to help with course setup, so I got the chance to ride along with a regular in the group before driving. This was great fun and it really showed me how hard you can push a car through the course. Like the course walk, any novice who gets the chance to do this should take advantage of it.

After riding along for a few runs, and watching a few runs from the sidelines it was my groups turn to drive. I moved my car to the grid from the adjacent parking lot, picked out a loaner helmet, and started to prepare mentally.

This is a two part post. To read the rest of the story check out part 2.

•  My First Autocross, Part 2