MikeWhitney wrote:
One thing that may not be obvious here, I think most people here that are saying "HPDE is better than autox" have been autoxing a lot longer than HPDEing. It's still fun and fresh and interesting to you. Depending on your learning curves, it may stay that way for a long time.
Y'all come back here after you have as many years dedicated to HPDEing as you did to autocross and let us know if your opinions have changed
Mine did.
I think a lot of people get to that 4-8 year point of doing most anything -- Auto-X or HPDE or probably rally-x -- and realize they need a new challenge. Just make sure your opinions about what is "best" is not really a reflection of where _you_ are on your learning curve.
Excellent post Mike -- spot on.
I did my first autocross in the fall of 1975, and I autocrossed as much as I could from that point on through about 1986. I did my first track event in 1981 at Road Atlanta, and I spent the entire decade of the 80's doing every track event I could: Road Atlanta, Mid-Ohio, Lime Rock and Summit Point (which I did so much I could do mental rehearsals of a lap and get within 2 seconds of my real lap time
). I took a long hiatus only doing a few autocrosses during the 90's before returning to track events 3 years ago and autox last year.
I've seen 3-4 decades of autocrossers and track junkies at many different events/clubs/etc. I've found without exception that top level autocrossers transition to track driving very easily and are usually outstanding at driving a car on track near but not "crazy over" (i.e. Armco crazy) the limits. They have tons of experience at the very fine nuances of car control -- intuitive experience. On the other hand, people who started out with track events but have never autocrossed have a much longer learning curve, and they rarely get the chance to learn how to control a car that is out of control. HPDE events are weak in that area of driver education. Whereas in autox, you are almost always past the limits at various different points on some of your runs as you probe the maximum possible, at an HPDE if you were to attempt to achieve the same with little experience, you would likely crash or be kicked out of the event (and rightly so).
An ideal HPDriverEducation event would combine both worlds. You would have a skidpad to teach car control and especially "look where you want the car to go" which works wonders on the skidpad. [As an aside, I just spent a day at the Performance Center M-school with my son, and I had a wonderful time on their skidpad with an E60 M5...tail out, lap after lap. I learned a heck of a lot in that short session feeling out where I needed to get the steering angle to at different points as the front end grip and the yaw angle varied wildly.] Plus the HP
DE would incorporate a very short, timed autocross, similar to what they do at the Performance Center, to allow students to go over the limits and eventually learn how to understand the limits of adhesion with direct feedback (lap times and preferably segment times too) of their progress. Track time would then be interspersed in the weekend to cement everything they have learned and put it to practice at speed.
Chuck
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