Autocross #13 January 30, 2006
The car was was still wearing the Kumhos, the weather wasn’t unpleasant, extra seat time never hurts, and I woke up early enough, so I went to ER’s first event of the season.
Sometimes smart people do stupid things…
It took a whopping 45 minutes to register. The process was a model of bureaucracy — one line for someone to examine registration cards and drivers licenses, another to collect the money, and a third to enter all the info into the computer and assign a number. The lines were still going strong after I’d finally finished registeration, passed tech, and walked the course.
The registration delays put us an hour behind in starting the event, and in order to keep us from running late they cut us from 4 runs to 3. For three runs I should have just stayed home. And it turned out we could have done four — against all odds the event ran smoothly once the runs started and we wrapped up just after 3pm.
In ER tradition the course was very fast — the organizers seem heavily biased towards high-horsepower, RWD cars. Lots of sweeping turns, just one slalom, no heavy braking sections. I thought that I did alright but it turned out that two Mini Cooper S were in my class. I got beat by by 0.959 and 2.228 seconds. Ouch.
I took videos of my seconds and third runs with my digital camera, they actually turned out pretty decent. Reviewing them it’s pretty clear that I’m giving up time on the big sweepers. Hopefully I’ll do better the next time I’m on a fast course.
