Sunday morning I got up at 6am and drove to Marina for a BMW car club autocross. It is the middle of the season for them, but it's the first one ever as far as I'm concerned.

[Since the three people that read this won't know, autocross is a game where people meet at a huge empty parking lot, and set up a temporary obstacle course out of traffic cones and chalk lines. Then you drive your car through it as fast as you can, competing with the other cars in your "class." Different car clubs run different series of these, which are more or less serious. The BMW club series is all very carefully tracked and points are assigned throughout the season and printed in their little magazine. It's still not like there are millions of dollars in celebrity endorsements at stake.]

So, my run group was third, meaning I worked the course for the first group (this means standing at some turn and putting cones back when somebody knocks them down), and waited around for three hours while the second group ran. I had about 11 runs total, and Adam was there to ride along with me for the first five or six of them. It helps quite a lot to ride with somebody that knows what they are doing, because sometimes you aren't even going to know which way you are supposed to turn, when all you see is a parking lot full of randomly assorted cones.

The outcome, of course, was that I suck horribly. It doesn't bother me that I was so bad at first, because to expect otherwise would be a violation of the snowflake principle, but it was incredibly frustrating to make almost zero progress in the next 10 tries. My first run, where I was very deliberately not trying to go fast, but only stay on the course, was 48 seconds and change. And my fastest run all day, one of the unscored "fun runs" at the end, was barely under 45 seconds–less than 10% faster. Bear in mind that the fastest guys were running about 36 seconds. Adam's first time on the course was 39s. Sucky sucky suck.

Part of the problem is that my car turns out to be pretty hard to drive for autocross. It's very touchy to avoid overpowering it through every corner (and autocross is all corners), so I was understeering like a crazy man through every run. I got Adam to drive it for the fun runs, and it understeered all over everywhere on him too (see his report for a more credible description).

Another mistake was driving the whole day with traction control. Adam noticed this a few seconds after he started to drive. Traction control means that the computer cuts the power if it thinks your wheels are going to slip, which is good when it stops you from spinning out on the freeway, but it slows you down. Obviously I'm not fast enough for that to really matter now, but if we assume that I am eventually going to want to turn it off, I might as well spend my scarce practice time learning to drive without it. I turned it off for one of my last fun runs, just to see what would happen, and what happened was that I spun the car all the way around in short order. I think this would have been avoided if I had not just spent 10 runs learning to drive with it on.

On the bright side, I think my having gone and sucked has encouraged Chrisi and Gary, who are almost ready to sign up for September. So although I'm barely a user, I'm already a pusher. Considering how much of the day you spend waiting around, it is definitely more fun with more of your friends.

Photos are by Mary Pozzi.

09 Aug 2007 00:22 PT - persistent link - trackback - 1 comment