Autocross #12 January 17, 2006
I’ve started the 2006 autocross season the right way: with a 1st-place trophy in STX. Unfortunately it wasn’t against Jorge, I haven’t seen him at an event since Hurricane Wilma, but a couple other WRXs showed up in STX.
Overall turn-out was huge for a CFR-IRCC event, 80 total entrants with 16 claiming novice status. My brother took some pictures. Temperature was a factor in the morning, it was in the low 40s when we arrived at the site and didn’t warm up much until the afternoon. Cold air == lower tire pressure == larger pressure gain from the tires heating up. I started at 38PSI and gained 4PSI after the first run.
The course was pretty short with many of the top cars / drivers running 37s to 39s, my best time was 43.973. The only “fast” sections were the slalom along the front and a straight along the back, both of which only covered about half of the lot’s width. All of the turns were fairly narrow, taking any of them wide would put you into a cone. Several drivers, myself included, took the opening slalom on their first run so fast that they end up smacking the outside cones of the first turn…
For my work assignment I got staging. More like pre-staging, I suppose. Someone else took the start, my job was to manage the lines: single-driver cars, multi-driver cars who need time to switch drivers and numbers between runs, and cars that have a legitimate reason to cut the line — re-runs, instructor-driven laps, etc. Keeping traffic flowing is easy enough, there’s always someone ready to take a lap, but keeping the flow balanced so that nobody gets pissed off or falls behind and has to make back-to-back runs at the end of the session is a delicate juggling act. I settled into a groove pretty quick, picked up a couple of compliments, and at the end of the session had no cars had fallen behind on their runs.
For future CFR events this season I have a “permanent” number, 11. I just wanted something easy to form from my segmented number kit but I’ve gone ahead and ordered a proper number panel from RallyDecals.com.
