Greg came again this time, but instead of running his miata he drove my car. This time I got there early enough to walk the track a couple times. Having been to the Porsche event with it's wide sweeping curves, the BMW CCA course seemed extra tight and narrow, although still more open than the last BMW event I was at. On the plus side, all the cones made it a lot easier to keep track of where the course was and avoid DNFs.
Since Greg and I were sharing a car, we were in separate groups so I ran first and worked second, and he worked the course first and drove second. There weren't a ton of people there, so we got to do five runs each instead of this group's usual four runs.
My first run I just used to feel out the track and the wet conditions and finished with a 52.7s. My second run I felt the limit a lot more through the curves which was fun, and resulted in a 48.7s. For my third run, a 48.8s lap, I concentrated on getting harder on the gas through some of the straighter sections, but in a couple spots that took me too deep into turns or left the car too unsettled when braking that hard just before the corner.
In the fourth run I concentrated on smoothing everything out a bit more - going as fast as possible through the straight-ish sections but still making sure I was slowed down enough for the tight turns. I shaved nearly a second off my time, coming down to a 47.9s. My fifth run was more of the same, plus I think by then the rain had stopped and the rivers across the track were starting to go away. I still overcooked it coming out of the last turn and got all squirrely though, which I'm sure cost me a little bit. Even with that though, my time dropped to a 47.5s.
Greg's runs during the second part of the morning were 51.7s, 51.3s, 49.6s, 50.0s, and 47.4s. He just barely pipped me on his very last run of the day! Actually, his last run almost didn't count because of some kind of timing issue. Greg had to check with the time keepers to see why his time didn't get posted, and they had to go back to the raw timing data to get his time.
Given all of the racing we've done together, we know just how well-matched we are with each other and it was no surprise that we'd finish the day less than a tenth apart. It's great having someone to run with where we're so closely matched.
Overall I finished 59th out of 87 for the day in raw times, but 17th overall in the performance-adjusted index, which I'm pretty happy with.
It looks like this event will be my last autocross of the year. I had a lot of fun getting into autocross this year for the first time. It's not exactly the same as racing on a full-sized race course with more traditional brake-turn in-apex-track out corners. But it's still a blast to hustle a car around the cones and feel the limits of what the car can do. I'm looking forward to getting out for more events next year!
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