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.