Wednesday, May 20, 2009

Easy would be Booring

So Now I've learned about slaloms carousels, sweepers, offsets, chicago boxes, increasing radius turns, decreasing radius turns, more offsets, long slaloms, looking ahead, visualization and verbalization... Enough school! Time to see if it helped!

Or so I thought... Mother nature had other ideas...

Points event #2 was not what I envisioned. Everything had been going just grand so far this season. Every one of the 4 days of autocross so far had had good or excellent weather. Dry conditions all day, nothing too cold for the clothes I brought, some days were even sunny and warm. I even managed to use sunscreen every time. Golden.

Not so for Points event #2. My dreams had imagined a day with glorious weather dry and 75 with sun and occasional clouds. My dreams had imagined a day where everything went smoothly and we all got 7 or 8 runs on a 60 second course. A day with conditions comparable to my previous two competitions so I could see my times drop dramatically due to all the recent practice and training. Here's the blow by blow of what really happened...
  • 6:30 am - Leave the Hotel, pavement wet and dry in spots, no rain... looks hopeful!
  • 7:00 am - Arrive at Devens... it's sprinkling the pavement is definitely wet.
  • 7:15 am - The rain is steady and puddles are forming, scratch the slicks, keep the AO48's
  • 7:30 am - I'm using my poncho as a tent by shutting one end of it in the door while taping numbers on my car.
  • 7:45 am - Windy wet, cold I bite the bullet and take off my poncho and windbreaker long enough to put on my sweat shirt.
  • 8:00 am - Course walks open. No chalk... they have to use crayon.
  • 8:45 am - Starting my 3rd walk of the course... not changing tires and stuff has at least one benefit. I'm wondering what happens to the car when it hits a puddle in a slalom...
  • 9:30 am - first run, the rain has dissipated to occasional sprinkles, but wind-shield wipers still on. I have to wipe my feet dry with a towel so that they don't slip on the pedals (much). I have no idea where the limits of traction are. I'm so distracted by figuring that out that I get 102 seconds + DNF for cutting off a cone. The top times at this point are in the low 80 and high 70 second range.
  • Second Run - The rain has stopped, there is still a moderate wind, conditions are drying rapidly. The pavement is still wet, but no where near as wet as the first run. How does that help... I have no clue, I push it further, and shave 7 seconds off my time, but so do the leaders. Top times are now in the low-mid 70's. I get a 95.101
  • Third Run - The pavement is mottled dry and wet, more dry than wet. I probably could have put my slicks on. But hesitated and didn't have time. So this one is mostly dry, but still on Ao48's... I shave another 6 seconds off. down to 87.451 + 1 cone (effectively an 89.451)
  • I console myself with the fact that the morning runs are worthless anyway given that the conditions are going to be so much better for the afternoon runs.
  • Then comes the second heat... complete chaos... Timing troubles cause half a dozen re-runs. A car breaks down and has to be pushed off course. We get a red flag for no good reason... and then 3 more cars are red flagged because one corner hasn't got the message that all is clear... this heat takes twice as long as it should. Meanwhile Russ runs times in the low 70's proving that I am still really really slow today. A Modified is running in the mid-60's...
  • Lunch is 20 minutes... I have peanut butter and jelly to make sandwiches... I forgot the bread. So it's peanut butter on cliff bars with Gatorade and a tiny swig of what's left of yesterday's coffee for lunch... gourmet at it's best. The announcement comes down. only 2 runs in the afternoon because the second heat took so much time.
  • Run 4 - I have the Kumho V710's on now. The pavement is dry, time for some real autocrossing.
  • Out of the gate, I forget to shift into second. I remember part way through the first slalom. I do shift but it distracts me and I get late on the last cone, which puts me late on the next element. I have to slow down to get back on line and I'm so releaved when I do that I don't look ahead and enter the next element at completely the wrong angle. Again slow down, get back on line, By the second half of the course I am settled down a bit. I brake a little to late at one point, but not catastrophically so. The back half of my run is almost ok. I shave another 6 seconds off my time... 83.560 with no cones. Finally I am (by my quick estimate) at a time that is better than the very first time I ever autocrossed.
  • Waiting for the second heat I practice my visualization over and over again, analyzing the mistakes I made, and walking myself through the course repeatedly in my head. I know I can do a lot better than the last run. I remember the NER school where I spun on my last run, and caution myself not to over do it either....
  • Final run... I shift early and pay attention in the first slalom. I stay on line and gather noticeably more speed before the first big turn. I remember that I need to brake earlier because I am going faster. I make it down the far stretch beautifully and take a good line into the second big turn... Since I'm on line I can gun it and I get my car up on the cams in the following sections (probably as much as 50-60 mph full throttle), but I remember to brake earlier than last time and get a good line through the next element. I've just corrected ALL of my major mistakes from the first run! Awesome!!!
  • O wait... I haven't' finished the course!!!... I should be heading for the other side of that cone!!!! $#!^!!!! I almost DNF by going around the wrong side of the cone. I nearly have to stop to correct and stay on course.... right before the big sweeper. Now I'm slow on that long element, and going into the offset slalom, very risky to put on speed in that slalom, so I just try to run it clean and then finish fast. I do finish fast, but my time is 83.9 half a second slower... despite almost stopping... CRAP. I know I could have been under 80 seconds... or at least close. Oh well... time to go shag cones for the second heat and curse my early celibration repeatedly...
  • At the end it turns out I came in # 5 out of 6 in SSM. The person who I beat was co-driving the car that broke down on course... They did fix it and run it and it broke down in heat 2 again, but there's a good chance that it wasn't performing well even when it wasn't breaking down.

So did the school help? If you just look at some relative measures on the hard numbers below I got worse after 3 days of school. But what the numbers don't show is the difficulties I overcame... and they also don't show the potential that my final run had until I started celebrating too early... I am sure I lost 2-4 seconds because of my near DNF... which means on the first half to 2/3 of the course I was running 1.5-3.5 seconds faster... I am pretty sure I could have run an 80. That would have put me at a sharp increase in all the % based statistics and nearly level in the factors...

I figure that if I had encountered these obstacles before all my schooling, I would have run my worst times ever. I know that I was able to make improvements... except for the last run, my times improved by leaps and bounds...

We'll see what the next one throws at me on the 30th...




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