THSCC Forums

(warning: this is long-winded )

First, let me start by saying this is my first post on the THSCC forums. I'm a new member, along with my wife, and we are both VERY happy to be part of the club.

Second, I'd like to thank a LOT of people for all the tips, words of wisdom, and general help that my wife and I received at the Novice school on Saturday and the AX on Sunday. These people include: EVERYONE who had something to do with making this all happen, Rick Butters (I've had him ride with me in two different cars, and he's my lucky charm), Marcus (for giving some STi advice), the "mystery guy" (sorry I forgot your name) that walked up to me while I was staged and showed me the "hands on tires" trick to check out how they were heating, my instructor from Saturday (I think his name was Steve? (That'd be me, Chris S, Glad I could help!) His son was also there), Emily (I think that was the woman who coached my wife on Saturday), and last, but certainly not least, the designer(s) of the course on Sunday (And Rodney and me again).

Obviously, I'm not as experienced as most (probably all) of you, but I felt that the course on Sunday was phenomenal. As my first Autocross, it gave me experience with a wide variety of things ranging from the typical slalom to the chicago boxes to the "onion". My goal, going into Sunday, was to have at least ONE run without a DNF. Walking the track, and seeing all those cones, was a bit unnerving at first but now I can blame it on my lack of experience. I managed to not get a single DNF and I only hit 1 cone the whole day. (I placed 9th in Novice out of 24 in an A-Stock STi)

I don't know all the rules about gate-sizes or how far this cone has to be away from that cone. All I know, is that I expected a challenge, and I was pleasantly rewarded. Looking on the brighter side, I would suggest to those naysayers (who didn't appreciate the gate sizes) to think of it this way: learn how to play Tennis with a golf ball, when you finally graduate to a real tennis ball, think about how much easier it will be to hit the ball. In other words, once you perfect the "smaller" gates, think about how much tighter you will drive in the "bigger" gates! heh

For the novice event, I would have loved to see a track set up like it was on Sunday. If all of we "newbies" could get comfortable with a track like that, then I'd wager we'd feel comfortable tackling ANYTHING.

A few suggestions / comments on the Novice event on Saturday:
1. A 2-minute session on proper usage of the walkies would have been great. Some people were keying the mic AFTER they started talking and I believe it led to some unnecessary confusion sometimes. It also sounded like some people were actually swallowing the walkies when they were talking (REALLY garbled.) Speak clearly. Speak about 6 inches away. Etc.
2. I wish it would have been set up like an actual event. I was a bit confused on Saturday with which lines to stand in, which meetings to attend, how (where) to put the numbers on, the best practices when "working the track", how to stage the car, etc. It's not that any one of those things is particularly hard to understand, but when I'm trying to listen to EVERYTHING/EVERYONE, and i'm unfamiliar with everything, and I'm already hella nervous to start with, it's a bit daunting. During the Novice class, if it was conducted EXACTLY like an actual event (with pauses for instruction), I think a lot of us would have been more at ease.
3. How feasible would one VERY technical course that incorporated all possible elements of an autocross be in comparison to two smaller courses? If the Sunday course would have been set up on Saturday, I think we could have run it in reverse (if possible) and it would have been an even better learning experience. At the very least, we would get a LOT of experience calling cones and DNF's which might possibly make us better at working the track, as well as driving it. I would even be down with timing (and recording) our times during the end of the class and posting them on the bus.

And what's up with all the sore arms? I'll leave my "old geezer" jokes to myself.

Finally, these are all my HUMBLE opinions and your mileage may vary... I had a great time and it was nice meeting ya'll. (sorry for the insanely long post. ) I'm sure I had a few more poignant things to say...but this post is too long and I forgot them all while typing it.

Hey Nathan,

I'm the mystery "hands on tire" guy. Glad you had a good time. The STi is a pig in terms of weight...just checking to see if you were overdriving it

Chris

(SM6 STi)

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Beauty is in the eye of the beer holder.

Nathan,
I enjoyed reading your first post. Welcome to the Premier Sports Car Club of NC! No kidding, you'll enjoy yourself and all the members. Glad you enjoyed the Novice school and I'm impressed that you remember so many names. You actully(IMHO) have some good ideas about explaining things to novices a little better. Like any situation, once we understand it we tend to forget how foreign it is to newcomers. I do remember Bernie's and my novice school at L'burg. A grid/B grid. Huhhh? When do you run A? B? However, take a deep breath, because it will sort it'self out pretty quickly.
Also, our club boasts some of the best drivers around. So, ride with as many as you can and get them to ride with you. Walk the course as much as possible and figure out the courses as best as you can, tight or open. You'll soon see that you're ahead of the game. Good luck and good driving!

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SCCA Solo Triad Award Recipient 2014
SCCA HSL National Champion 2012
SCCA DSL National Champion 2013
SCCA DSL National Champion 2014
NCR National Driver of the Year 2012
THSCC Heel of the Year 2011
Former Club Secretary
http://www.petscompanioninn.com

Bernie can attest to this better than I , but as you get older, you just don't care what other people think about your opinions. Getting bashed is no big deal.

Kevin does have a great idea. Last year at Sanford he kept Les and I from making some big mistakes. I thought the course was fun and if the wireless timer had worked, we wouldn't have had the 80 mph finish.

It is hard to design a course. I'm struggling with the Greenville design right now. How do I make it fun, interesting, safe and fair? The site only allows for so much variety and there are things to hit if a car gets way out of control. I'd hate to see someone pull a Ryan and end up 12 feet from the building backwards, especially in MY car! Unlike his Miata, if you push the gas pedal in my car, something happens very quickly!

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Rubbin' is Racin'

Walter, I think 'designing' a course ahead of time might be a mistake. I would think of elements you would like to incorporate and basic idea of how the site looks, but outside of that, I would get there early and throw cones out of the bus and see what shakes out. If you want some help with it, I will be at Chateau Holton the night before the event. - AB

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'14 Toyota Sequoia Platinum 4WD
Super Westerfield Bros - '93 Integra - LeChump Du Jour
STX 93 - Scion FR-S

EXACTLY!!!!!

I usually plan what sort of things I want to be doing with the car, then work with the shape & size of the site to either make that happen or discard it because it just won't work & think up something new. And the most important thing... I drive it multiple times in my own car, at full speed, so I can tweak it. If you just throw some stuff out there, drive it once in somebody else's car (so you don't "cheat" ) and call it good, it's probably not. Been there, done that & hated it - that's why I'm willing to run X/AM if I need to in order to make sure my course doesn't suck.

Cosby and Brian can tell you how much tweaking went into the Sanford course to make it flow exactly the way I wanted it to. Especially the section after you came back through the crossover - probably about an hour of tweaking went into that. But I stuck with my idea of what I wanted to be doing with the car there & tried as many different things as I could come up with to make it work. I was pretty happy with it.

One data point, worth what you paid for it : Back when I used to chair the SCCA's autocross at the State Fairgrounds, I always designed the course ahead of time. I photocopied a bunch of scale drawings of the site, with the drains and slope marked, and worked it out beforehand. Invariably there were slight differences when I went to lay it out, but I did have the advantage that I could get on the site every lunchtime. With satellite photos nowadays at least making the scale drawing would be really easy. I had to pace the darn thing out and make my own drawing from scratch. (In the snow. Uphill both ways. With no shoes.)


Now on to Nathan's post, and unfortunately my reply is long-winded too. My terminology and outlook may be outdated -- it's probably been 20 years since I designed a course -- but it works.

Remember that there is a big difference between "tight" and "gate width". They are almost completely unrelated. I don't think anyone is complaining much about "tight" (I love tight myself, despite my car choice), but about the gate width in a couple of elements.

The last time I designed a course at the State Fairgrounds, many years ago, was right after a period when people in THSCC (I was a member of both then) had been complaining bitterly about gate widths. There was a popular notion that gate width had something to do with the tightness of the course. So I designed a course using nothing but 20-foot gates. It was the tightest they'd ever seen at that site. (Actually one gate was 18 feet. For effect, and to drive home the message , I apologized at the drivers meeting for making that one gate so narrow.)

The tightness of the course is determined by the path between the "critical" cones. Only one cone in a regular gate matters, the one you'll be cutting close (usually the "inside" one with the pointer cone, but not always). The other cone is just noise, there to catch you if you're really sloppy or out of control, but primarily to help show you visually where the course goes. As an extreme example, Chicago Boxes are two or three critical cones with a lot of noise. Likewise, either the first or last cone in a slalom can usually be ignored -- the trick to doing an optional slalom is choosing which one you want to ignore. The tightness of the course is solely determined by the path between the critical cones -- you can place the noise cones wherever you like, they don't affect anything.

The boxes in question had the problem that what should have been a noise cone intruded on the course. The exit from the box should have had one critical cone and one noise cone. The path driven should have been close to one of those exit cones, and had 2-3 feet clearance on the other side. Instead, with a large car, slow steering, and a large turning radius, both those cones were critical.

That gate was difficult to take in an F-body whether you drove the element at 40mph or 5 mph. A course element should be difficult to take at speed, not difficult to take period. If it's hard to fit a car physically through an element, it stops having the fun of autocrossing and starts having the fun of parallel parking.

The other problem with such an element is it removes any skill in determining the line. What separates a good driver from a decent driver, what makes autocrossing a challenge, is in choosing the line and managing the car dynamics. When it is physically hard to fit a car through a space, you've taken that away -- your line is determined by what will fit, and your car dynamics by what that line dictates. Using the Nathan Analogy you're playing tennis with a 12-ft beach ball -- you have no choice how to hit it if you want to get it over the net, there's no skill in placement at all.

The optional slalom was the golf ball. Tight entrance or tight exit, ignore the first cone or ignore the last. How to blend your choice into the other elements. Managing weight transfer and traction to get that done. The Onion Ring too -- easy to drive, hard to drive fast. The fast sweeper -- easy to drive, hard to balance speed with the correct positioning. That's the challenge of autocrossing.

(Oh, by "physically" I'm talking about the car's point of view, not the driver.)

Final note, but an important one:

This post is a small treatise on course design, with a specific example as illustration. This is not another complaining post. Having voiced my opinion it was a closed issue as far as I'm concerned. I'll remember the fun of the event, not the details of one small element in many. The event chairs did a great job, no question or reservations on my part whatsoever.

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Martyn Wheeler
AXing Kit's '05 Mazda 3, #29 HStock
(when The Gonzo Symphonic allows)

gates are stupid & pointless, anyway. I like designing courses with gates only at start & finish.

Amen brotha!

(PS - I really, really have never driven an autocross course I didn't like. I like some more than others but I have liked them ALL!)

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Mike Whitney
whit32@gmail.com, 919-454-5445
V10, V8, V8t, I6, I6, V6, F4t, I4, I4, I4, I4, I2, 1, 1

Scott and I have a good plan for Sanford ...

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Has no responsibility whatsoever.

IMHO a course does not have to be tight to be challenging, nor is an open course necessarily an easy course. A tight course tends to dictate the line, and that in turn makes the car an important element in how fast you can go. All well prepared cars should have an equal chance of negotiating the course "at normal highway speeds" as in the definition of AX. You should not have to park a car to make it thru a narrow gate any more than you should put a pivot cone in a narrower lane than the turning radius of most cars. There should also be enough room between elements to allow the driver to perform the required tasks. This was something I found was a problem in the "P" course at the novice school. The slallom and the pivot cone were too close together to get the car into position for the pivot, you could not brake and downshift in a straight line (in fact you could not drive it at any speed without being in a continuous turn) without shooting well past the pivot cone, especially if you went around it in the counter-clockwise direction. I finall realized the problem and had my students go clockwise around it since it added 20' of space in a relatively straight line to the approach. If you expect the drivers to slow down, give them enough room to do so in a straight line without needing to lock up the tires, this includes after the finish.
The courses at the national championships are what most here would call VERY open, but are not especially "fast" and are extremely challenging because they reward the driver who can find the best line thru it. The car becomes less of a factor and puts the emphasis on the driver's skill.
The courses I've designed I first decided the basic line I wanted then figured out the critical cone placement that created that line, then filled in around those with the dummy cones. Don't just set out features, but look at what is happening between those features as well. Sometimes walking the course you just set out backwards will show you where you have transition problems.
I have run courses I've hated! The 05 Toledo National tour courses immediately come to mind a 1/4 mile 3rd gear dragrace into a overly tight 180 sweeper that required a 3rd to 1st downshift. It is near impossible to do a 3rd to 1st downshift in the Celica... 2nd day a first gear tight sweeper into the finish with cones tight around the outside...

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SPIN or WIN!
there's no glory for going slow.

I can attest to that, Thanks for reminding me Walter. But you kinda gotta like a course where a natural mini( driven by an old guy) smokes a camero driven by an old guy who thinks he's young er. O.K. start the bashing

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2004 C5(415whp,390ft/lbs),
1997C5,1997Trans Am, 1986 C4,
1990 Miata, 1976 MGB,1997 Protege, 1989 MR2

Kevin/Aaron,

I think the school would be a great idea if you guys were willing to do it. Limit the school to only people who have been event chairs and/or ones willing to commit to doing it. Instead of a wide open free for all of people who will never actually do it. Charge a fee for the class to help cover your time and site rental.

Quite honestly I don't understand this notion you guys have off think of elements, toss cones out of the bus, then connect them on the fly. The course I did with Miles 3 years ago at L'burg was pretty decent. The one Rob and I did at L'burg wasn't right. The part I got confused on was spacing elements. I did draw up our map ahead of time and maybe that doesn't work. But I don't know a better way to do it. When you chair an event once a year or two it's not like you get much practice to hone the skill. I'd love to have the use of Sanford for a weekend to just throw down cones, drive them, move them, etc...

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http://www.greywinds.com

Oh trust me. I'll speak up whenever I want to and the least of my concerns will be whether my opinion is popular. You're right guys. Getting bashed is no big deal...

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http://www.greywinds.com

Donna, another question occurred to me. Have you guys applied wax to the clear bra? As I understand you are supposed to wax it just like the rest of the car. I wonder if some wax on the clear stuff would make cone marks more easy to remove as it does on the rest of the car.