10/25 BMWCCA Autocross

Last Sunday I did autocross with the National Capital chapter of the BMW Car Club of America at Baysox Stadium. It had been a year since I ran with BMWCCA last, and there were certainly a few things to like compared to the PCA events at BWI.

The weather wasn't great, but I'm always happy to race in the rain and it meant that we only had about 30 racers total. This gave us a chance to do seven runs each and I was still out of there by 12:30pm. I'm sure part of that was the weather but it was also that BMWCCA does an AM and PM session instead of just taking on however-many racers happen to register and then going as late in the day as you have to go.

One of the exciting things about this event was that it was my first chance to use my new GoPro for autocross (the prior week's event being abruptly canceled before I could run). I didn't have enough time to play around with different mounting points, so I just did an interior mount from the underside of the sunroof for all of my runs. I did try playing with the different zoom levels, and it seemed like the widest angle was the best. I also tried capturing sound using an external mic mounted near the center console. It worked okay but I ended up with a lot of noise from my feet on the pedals and other things in the car creaking through sharp turns, as opposed to a great engine or exhaust note.  Next time hopefully I have time for different camera angles and a better mic mounting position.

The other fun thing I got to try this time was my new Michelin Pilot Sport A/S 3's. This was my first autocross not using run-flats and they felt absolutely awesome. Granted this was a wet course so I couldn't feel the maximum grip level, but still the tires had tons of steering wheel feedback and responsiveness.

I'm not sure if it was the rain, the set of cars, or just a particularly good day of driving for me, but I actually came up with some pretty good times. I finished 16th overall and 8th in my heat when the track was wettest. With the PAX adjustments (accounting for car performance), I actually finished with the 5th best time and the 2nd best of my heat!! It was fun posting such a fast time and it was a great way to close out the season of autocross.

I could see doing fewer autocross events next year just because it's so much time on a weekend day for such little actual driving. But I'll definitely do at least an event or two and I'm already looking forward to getting out again. :-)

10/17 PCA Autocross

The last Chesapeake Porsche Club autocross of the year ended up being a very memorable one - but for very much the wrong reason.

The day started off well, with a big crowd of 60 drivers and a nice collection of cars - a Lotus Elise, two Vipers, an NSX, and of course all the Porsches. With so many drivers, we split up into three groups, with me working the track during the first heat and driving during the third heat. Working the flag station was pretty uneventful. I was able to pick up on where the drivers were having trouble with the track which I figured would help when it was my turn to drive.

During the second heat I was getting my GoPro ready for my turn in the third heat when I heard a crunch out on track. I looked up to see a Porsche Cayman stopped out at the corner of the lot. My immediate thought was that he hit the curb out there, but there were car parts strewn around him and it was obvious that he had hit the concrete base of the light post. I didn't see it happen, but apparently he started fishtailing and, instead of jumping on the brakes to stop the car, continued to try to correct the spin as he careened into the light pole. The whole side of his car was wrecked and three airbags deployed.

It was clearly an expensive wreck, but it was really fortunate that nobody was hurt. Not only was the driver in danger (a couple feet to the left and he would have slammed into the concrete head-on), but that pole was also the flag station for the course workers so there were two people standing right there when it happened. In fact, that was the very pole that I was standing next to while working the course myself during the first heat.

Once the autocross chairs saw the extent of the damage, they called an end to the event for the day. The had to call a tow truck to remove the car, plus I think they had to take some measurements and pictures to document that the track setup itself wasn't a contributing factor to the accident.

The whole thing was a big reminder to everyone of what the risks are for something even as relatively controlled and safe as autocross is supposed to be. You have to be aware of where the dangerous obstacles are and make sure you aren't pushing the car in any kind of risky way when there's a danger of breaking the car or getting yourself or others hurt. It was disappointing to spend so much of the day on the event and never get to drive, but the important thing was that nobody was hurt. Hopefully the whole thing gets resolved as well as possible for the driver and the club.

10/19 Autobahn Arrive and Drive

Last night the same group of four of us from the 9/3 trip returned to Autobahn for some more karting. It was also my first time using my new GoPro at Autobahn!

We started off on Monaco and I was pretty fast once again - 1.18s clear of the nearest competition. It was good enough for the #1 best time of the week! Actually they reset the times every Monday morning, so the fact that we were there at 5:30pm on Monday night made the best times pretty doable. Still it was fun to see my name on the top of the sheet.

On Le Mans, Greg bested me by 0.33s. We were also out there with someone warming up for league night and he posted a truly fast time that was almost a second faster than my best.

In terms of raw times, I was the fastest of the night among the four of us, which was fun again. I tried calculating compared to how people improved their times from our last trip out though, and by that score Greg had the best "adjusted" times (Colby as well, but he only ran on Monaco). As we get more trips recorded and a more established average, it'll be interesting to see how the "winner" each night moves around as everyone's time gets more based on just beating their own averages.

As far as the GoPro - I used a mount on the chin of my helmet in order to get more of a first person view than the top of the helmet. The outcome certainly seemed very first-person with my hands and arms practically coming from the sides of the camera view. With the camera angle a few inches below my eyes though, it was actually enough to make the steering wheel take up a ton of the camera view. The videos weren't a total loss since you spend so much time looking to either side of the steering wheel at approaching corners, but I could still see some other locations of helmet mounts working out better for karting.

2015 Gotham Dream Car Sprint

Today I got to drive a Ferrari and Lamborghini for a second time (the first being last year's Dream Car Sprint in Aberdeen). This time the event was in Baltimore at one of the parking lots next to the Ravens stadium. It didn't quite live up to last year's awesome time, but I still had a lot of fun.

Although the location was way more convenient for us, the smaller parking lot meant that the course was much more confined and quite a bit slower. It was just a figure-eight and the "road" marked out by the cones was very narrow. On the upside though, the slower speed and tighter corners made it even easier to play around with the car at the limit.

I drove the Lamborghini first - a black Gallardo convertible. It had tons of power and sounded fantastic. The traction control (they wouldn't let me turn it off) still allowed me to slide the car around through corners, which was a lot of fun.

The Ferrari F430 was second and had a bit of a rocky start. As soon as I started to pull away, the car stalled! I started it again and gave it a bit more gas this time, and the engine note sounded really strange. On top of that, when I tried to get on the gas it would only give me about 20% power. The Gotham Dream Cars guy had me pull it in right away and they opened up the hood to figure out what was wrong. After about five minutes of waiting, they had it working again.

I blipped the throttle a few times while I was sitting there waiting to go on track. We were sitting underneath a highway overpass, so the engine note of the revving Ferrari was just fantastic. On track, it was actually not quite as nice to drive as the Ferrari I drove last year. I don't know if it was the tires or the tighter track or what, but it seemed to squirm a lot under braking, and the traction control was a lot more intrusive as I tried to accelerate out of the corners.

I'm surprised to say it, but I think if I magically had $150k of disposable income I might actually buy the Gallardo instead of the the Ferrari. Not only was it the more fun car to drive today, but I absolutely love how the Gallardo looks.

As much fun as it was for me, the most important thing was that my mom, who also drove the Ferrari, had a blast. I got her the Dream Car Sprint for Christmas this year partly because she missed an opportunity 10+ years ago to ride in a Dodge Viper around Lime Rock Park driven by an actual race car driver. I was hoping this would make up for that missed opportunity and she seemed to really enjoy the whole experience.

9/3 Autobahn Arrive and Drive

On Thursday a few of us from work got together for another Arrive and Drive at Autobahn Indoor Speedway. It's been five long months since the last time we visited Autobahn, and as soon as we took our first laps we were all questioning why it had been so long. It was so much fun hustling those karts around the track.

The first heat we did on Le Mans and I got the best time over Greg by the tiniest possible margin - a single thousandth of a second! Greg and I were both faster than Colby by four tenths, and faster than Paul P. by nine tenths.

At the start of the second heat, this time on the Monaco track, the course worker told us to put our visors down. I forgot my own helmet and trying to see through the scuffed and scratched visor of the loaner really made me wish I hadn't.

My kart felt great on Monaco and I got the best time once again - this time by a significantly wider margin. Greg unfortunately had a bum kart, but he still managed to come in four tenths faster than Colby again and over a second faster than Paul P. My best lap though was a full second faster than Greg's! Not only that, but it was good enough for the tenth best lap of the week on Monaco. The time sheets show the names and lap times for the top twelve laps of the week so it's always extra fun to crack into that top twelve.

It sucks that I didn't really get a fair fight with Greg in the last heat because of his lousy kart, but I have a feeling my time would have been pretty hard to beat regardless. Either way, I'll happily take over the office trophy until the next time we go out. :-)

8/22 PCA Autocross

This past weekend I ran autocross once again with the Porsche Club of America. Honestly, waking up at 6am to prep my car, and with all the delays last time making it such a long day the last time I went, I wasn't all that enthusiastic about going. The weather was gorgeous though and once I was at the track doing my walk-throughs, I was getting more exciting.

I've always enjoyed the track layouts the Chesapeake PCA puts together at this location, but this one was particularly great. Despite being a relatively small space to run, the course was filled with smooth sweeping curves and a pretty fast straight. The longer turns were much better for feeling the car's limit and managing the balance through the curve. Even the long-time autocross veterans were talking about how much they enjoyed the layout.

I was the 12th car to run and it seemed like a lot of people ahead of me were going off-course (going the wrong way through the cones). I felt like I had pretty good knowledge of the course from my walk-throughs, but still my first run I was concentrating extra hard to make sure I didn't get a DNF. I didn't push the car all that hard, but I stayed on course so I was happy with my 61.694s time.

The next runs I pushed harder as I got a better idea of which turns I could take faster and which turns I needed to take slower. My 2nd run dropped over two seconds down to a 59.312s. Then my 3rd run was a four-tenths improvement down to 58.910s. I figured the time improvements were going to be harder to come by, but I tried to concentrate hard in my 4th run on braking early, keeping it tidy through the turns, and late apexing so that I could roll onto the gas earlier and carry more speed into the straight fast sections. I was shocked to see a 1.3s improvement down to a 57.593s! Of course, the 5th run I was back to pushing too hard and braking too late, and set a 58.549s for my final run of the day.

One of the downsides of running with PCA in my BMW is that I don't have many other similar cars to compare my times to. The fastest cars were running between 49s and 52s, so it makes my 57s seem pretty slow. There are a handful of drivers that seem to be consistently around my times though, so I'll be curious when the full results get posted to see how I fared against them. Regardless of how my times compare to other drivers though, I had a great time pushing my car around the track and a fun day overall.

7/18 PCA Autocross

Last weekend I ran autocross with the Chesapeake Porsche Club of America again. The driving was fun but weather delays and a large group of drivers made for a pretty long day.

Once again this time I got to the track in time to do several walk throughs (course map). As usual, the course designers managed to pack some fast sections and nice sweeping curves into the track layout despite being limited to such a small parking lot. One minor downside of the course was that we could only run one car at a time, due to the track doubling back through itself so much. I'm sure this was another contributor to the day taking so long. On the plus side, unlike last time, it was a lot easier for the course workers to replace cones in between runs without having to worry about the next car coming through the course as quickly.

There were over fifty drivers for this event, so they broke us up into three groups. I was driving in the second group and working the track during the third, which meant I was sitting around waiting for a while during the first group. It was just as well because storms came through and those first-heat track workers got a bit wet. During the bulk of the storms, they stopped racing and everyone either waited under cover or in their cars for the storms to pass. It ended up being at least an hour delay - maybe closer to two hours.

Despite the delay, they still did five runs for everyone so it was after 11:30 before I was on track in the second group. As soon as the course was cold between groups I went out and did a quick walkthrough since it had been so long. It was a good thing I did apparently because lots of other cars ended up going off course (getting lost) during their runs.

The rain had stopped by the time we went on track, but the pavement was still wet. It made for some unimpressive times but I always have fun sliding the car around on the wet track. By the 2nd or 3rd run the track was drying out though, and my time dropped from 57.304s to 54.866s and then down to 54.638s. For my fourth run I pushed even harder and brought my time down to 53.658s, despite getting pretty loose coming out of one of the right-handers. Given that "moment," I was hopeful that I could bring my time down significantly further in my final run by keeping things a bit more tidy. Perhaps I pulled back a little too much though, because while I did drop down another two tenths (to 53.455s), it wasn't really the drop I was hoping for. Maybe my fourth run was just better than I thought it was. :-)

At the very end of my group after I was finished with my final run, one of the other cars (a Porsche 911 I believe) came into the last section of track too hot, got loose trying to go through the slalom prior to the stop gate, and then ended up spinning and backing into the concrete barriers! He didn't hit super hard, but it was enough to give the bumper and exhaust pipe on one corner a pretty good dent. I would imagine that pretty well ruined his day at the track. For as much as the autocross courses are designed to be nice and safe around all these cones in the parking lots, it's still really on the drivers to know where they can push safely to/past the limit and where they need to make sure they're in total control - any spots where you're at any risk of hitting something hard are not the spots to be getting sideways.

By the time I was working the track for the third group of drivers, the clouds had cleared and the sun was out in full force. I suppose for mid-July it could have been a lot worse, but it was still feeling like we were baking by the end of it.

When it was all said and done the autocross didn't wrap up until about 3 in the afternoon. They normally finish closer to noon or 1 and it was a real pain to have the autocross unexpectedly run so late in the afternoon. We had to cancel our other plans for the day and it made for an even busier Sunday. I guess next time I go out with PCA I'll be prepared for the possibility that it goes so late, but hopefully we'll dodge the rain and we'll be finishing at a more reasonable time again.

They haven't posted the results for the day yet, so check back at the this space to see how I did compared to the other drivers. I think the fastest times were in the 49's and low 50's. I'll be curious to see how I compare to the people who I've been close to in previous autocrosses though.

5/16 PCA Autocross

Last Saturday I ran autocross with the Chesapeake chapter of the Porsche Club of America for the second time. The course was great, everyone was laid back, and it was a gorgeous day to be outside racing. This was also my first autocross since buying my new helmet, and it was nice not having to worry about finding a loaner helmet that fit.

Unlike my last PCA autocross, I actually got to the lot in plenty of time to do tech and a couple course walk-throughs this time, so that made it a lot more relaxing right off the bat. I also ran in the 2nd group this time, which I've almost never done, so I got a chance to see the other cars go through the course for a while first and see where they seemed to be having problems.

Finally at about 10:45, it was my turn to go out. It's amazing how much tighter the course is when you're driving compared to walking. The first run is always a lot of feeling out of the course, and it's always a bit of a surprise to see which parts of the course are slower and tighter than expected. My first run came in at 60.599s. The next run I attacked the course a lot harder, but that also meant coming in too hot on a lot of corners and wasting time getting the car collected and rotated rather than shooting off towards the next turn. Still, at 56.851s I was happy with the improvement.

The next three runs saw continual improvement - 56.020s, 55.534s, 55.263s - as I got a better handle on where I could really maximize speed and where I needed to get the car slowed down early to help get around tight turns quickly and back on the gas. I finished 24th overall out of 34 drivers, and given that the vast majority of those other drivers were in Porsche 911's, boxters, and caymans, I feel like that's not a bad result.

One thing I really noticed this time was how much nicer a better set of tires would be for autocross. I'm still running my normal daily run-flats for autocross and they just have so little feel at the edge of adhesion. It seems like you just have to use your butt and feel the car rotate to even tell when the car is breaking loose. I think with a more grippy set of tires, I'd be able to feel the grip and the limit through the steering wheel a lot better. That should make it a lot easier to feel what the car is doing and keep the car at the limit more consistently. Once I eventually get my garage fixed up and have space to store a spare set of wheels and tires, I'll be bumping up a set of racing tires to the top of my wish list.

This trip confirmed all the things I liked about the PCA-CHS autocross the last time out. Everyone seems really laid back. And, like last time, the course had some nice sweeping turns that really allowed you to get up some speed. The only downside of the course was that, since there were some sections where the cars passed through twice, it was hard for the course workers to run out and fix a cone and run back to their station safely. At one point during the 2nd group of racing they had to actually stop the racing to remind the workers to make sure they're paying 100% attention to where the cars are on track when they run out to fix knocked-down cones. Other than that though it was great day. The other nice thing about the PCA autocross is that the location is only about 10 minutes from home, so my wife and daughter came out again to root me on, which is always fun.

My next autocross is just a little over a month away with BMWCCA. It's my first time at FedEx field which I've heard is great for autocross, so I'm looking forward to it!

New Helmet and Autobahn Arrive and Drive

A couple weeks ago I went down to OG Racing in VA to buy my first helmet. Amy got me a gift card for Christmas and with autocross season fast approaching, it was time to get down there and buy. I was a little hesitant to buy an SA2010 with the SA2015s coming out next Winter, but Amy convinced me to go ahead and buy one now. Since it's my first helmet, I'm sure I'll learn a thing or two about what I need in a helmet and what things I might do differently for my next helmet purchase.

I ended up getting a white Bell M4 SA2010 in medium. The M4, compared to some other more karting-focused helmets I looked at, had a nice large eyeport that should be better for looking at gauges and things when racing in my car. The size was the biggest question mark and I'm still not 100% positive that medium was best choice. The helmet is pretty snug. It's hard to get my ears into the thing without them folding up in the helmet, and I really have to jam the helmet down on my head to feel like it's far enough down around my chin. But, supposedly as I use it more the cushioning is supposed to compress a little and the helmet will loosen up a little. I don't think it's quite tight enough to be painful, but boy it's close.

Tonight I got to try the helmet out for the first time at Autobahn with a couple friends from work. The place was super busy and it took forever to actually get on the track. And then on track, some of the traffic was really slow and others were spinning out so frequently that they'd have to slow all the cars down to get people pointed in the right direction. I need to stick with weeknights and mid-day trips to avoid the big crowds in the future.

Still despite the crowds, some of the racing was definitely fun. I managed to get some clean laps here and there and post the 31st best time of the week on one track and the 37th best time of the week on the other. Not stellar, but okay for having been away from the track for so long. I also finished with the best time in all three of my races, so that's always fun. My friends from work were also faster than most of the rest of the random drivers we were with, so that was fun too.

It was great using my new helmet for the first time. No loaner helmet or mandatory head sock. The helmet still feels just a little on the tight side. I never noticed it on track, but by the end of the afternoon, as we were sitting on the grid waiting to race, I was starting to feel the pressure of the helmet around my head. If it turns out the helmet is too tight and doesn't break in, then I'll be shopping for an SA2015 next winter. :-)