I attended autocross school yesterday. I was tremendously fun and educational!
We started with an excellent classroom session. It covered many things I was familiar with regarding cornering, braking, etc, but it was handy to hear it again, as there's always something new to learn, or little tips to pick up.
Next, we got in our cars and cyled through three exercises:
- Skid pad. Large (100' across?) and small (60' across) cone circles next to each other that allowed you to practice holding a line on either, and then transition to doing a figure 8 between them, which required adjusting your speed. First run, my instructor had me run it without any advise to see how I drove it, and I spun the car! I was running some old, cold V700s, and was being jerky with inputs, so it was driver error of course, but getting the pro backwards was something I'd never done before, glad it was on a track, it was fun! Second run, he had me hold the wheel in one spot, and use the throttle to tighten or widen the line, which was really cool to try. I realized I'd been going about running sweepers all wrong. During one of the runs, he says "hit a cone, any one, just pick one and hit it!" It was surprisingly hard to do. It made a really strong point about how hard I should be turning in and how tight my line wasn't
- Triangle. triangular course roughly 100' on a side with corners of different angles. Great practice for picking a braking point, late apexing, tracking out, and looking ahead. Again, I need to work on turning in harder. I didn't hit a single apex cone. A buddy who is fast recently told me "Try to run over the apex cone, because this car will push wide and you'll pass it close" Good advise
- Slalom. Wide spaced cone slalom going out, 180 sweeper, tight slalom coming back. First run, the instructors offered to drive the car to so we could see it done well. My instructor had a great run, muttering "front.. wheel.. drive.." as he pushes around the sweeper . We got 6 or 7 runs. I had a few clean runs, but never any I was really happy with. I seemed to be fighting the car too much and didn't ever get a really good rhythm going. I got some good advise, but had a tough time applying it.
After lunch, they set up a "mini" course, which turned out to be as long as and more technical than most regular solo courses. My instructor was a fast smooth Civic driver, so he had great advise as we worked through the course. Mostly I needed to keep looking ahead. I started talking out loud about what I was trying to do, he said that he often talks his way through the course, saying things like look ahead, late apex, tighter, etc, so that's something I'm going to do now.
Unfortunately, today's autocross was canceled for weather, because I was REALLY wanting to apply what I learned. Now I'm looking forward to the season opener in a couple weeks.
As a side note, another driver had a 323GTX that he'd done some neat mods to. He mentioned that he's on the site occasionally.
We started with an excellent classroom session. It covered many things I was familiar with regarding cornering, braking, etc, but it was handy to hear it again, as there's always something new to learn, or little tips to pick up.
Next, we got in our cars and cyled through three exercises:
- Skid pad. Large (100' across?) and small (60' across) cone circles next to each other that allowed you to practice holding a line on either, and then transition to doing a figure 8 between them, which required adjusting your speed. First run, my instructor had me run it without any advise to see how I drove it, and I spun the car! I was running some old, cold V700s, and was being jerky with inputs, so it was driver error of course, but getting the pro backwards was something I'd never done before, glad it was on a track, it was fun! Second run, he had me hold the wheel in one spot, and use the throttle to tighten or widen the line, which was really cool to try. I realized I'd been going about running sweepers all wrong. During one of the runs, he says "hit a cone, any one, just pick one and hit it!" It was surprisingly hard to do. It made a really strong point about how hard I should be turning in and how tight my line wasn't
- Triangle. triangular course roughly 100' on a side with corners of different angles. Great practice for picking a braking point, late apexing, tracking out, and looking ahead. Again, I need to work on turning in harder. I didn't hit a single apex cone. A buddy who is fast recently told me "Try to run over the apex cone, because this car will push wide and you'll pass it close" Good advise
- Slalom. Wide spaced cone slalom going out, 180 sweeper, tight slalom coming back. First run, the instructors offered to drive the car to so we could see it done well. My instructor had a great run, muttering "front.. wheel.. drive.." as he pushes around the sweeper . We got 6 or 7 runs. I had a few clean runs, but never any I was really happy with. I seemed to be fighting the car too much and didn't ever get a really good rhythm going. I got some good advise, but had a tough time applying it.
After lunch, they set up a "mini" course, which turned out to be as long as and more technical than most regular solo courses. My instructor was a fast smooth Civic driver, so he had great advise as we worked through the course. Mostly I needed to keep looking ahead. I started talking out loud about what I was trying to do, he said that he often talks his way through the course, saying things like look ahead, late apex, tighter, etc, so that's something I'm going to do now.
Unfortunately, today's autocross was canceled for weather, because I was REALLY wanting to apply what I learned. Now I'm looking forward to the season opener in a couple weeks.
As a side note, another driver had a 323GTX that he'd done some neat mods to. He mentioned that he's on the site occasionally.
Comment