We suck, but our blog rocks!

I just ran the autocross.  While I was over there, a gentleman came up to me and congratulated me on having the most up-to-date One Lap blog.  I took that as my cue to go find a place to do an update!

Jeff ran the race track this morning.  New track, a couple blind turns, cold and a little wet... so he wasn't pushing it too hard.  Still, he finished something like 6 seconds back from our nemesis (nemesi?) in the ol' Civic.  2 seconds per lap really isn't bad considering their car is 300 pounds lighter and has at least 50 more horsepower.  Jeff promises to do better this afternoon, which is he is lined up and poised to do right now.

The autocross course was pretty simple.  A slalom, hard left, long decreasing radius 2nd gear sweeper (that bit a lot of people who underestimated the decreasing radius), short straight, sweeper to the left, skidpad turn to the right, another short straight and a ridiculously tight first-gear double hairpin turn.  The final shot to the finish had a little kink to the right in it, too.  I'd say the first half of the course was pretty typical autocross, the last 1/3 was pretty darned tight!  Would have been nice if they'd have called in a local autocross club to set up the autocross instead of having folks who apparently don't do a lot of autocross set up the course.  There were way too many cones, and it was a bit hard to follow.  Oh well.

They let us walk the course from about 10am until noon.  About 12:30 they started running the cars, and it was "just line up and run whenever".  One run.  No second chances.

I sat and watched about the first 20 cars run and became more confident in how I might finish overall.  There are a LOT of non-autocrossers in the One Lap roster, possibly half or more claim to have never autocrossed before.  Bad for them... good for me.

Josh (our bud in the old Civic) got fast through the slalom and blew the left hander to the point that he went to the outside of the gate.  I didn't realize he'd done that at the time, I just saw him lock up the brakes and knew that he'd blown his time... but with the off-course, his time didn't matter.  Bad for him... good for me.

I watched the Smart go through the course.  He made the same mistake a lot of people did and misread the decreasing radius turn, coming nearly to a stop there.  (a LOT of people were doing that)  If that wasn't bad enough, he blew the finish and DNF'd.  (bad for him... good for me)  I guess he walked the course really early, while they were still making changes to it.  The initial course design had the start and finish going through the same gate.  They had that changed before the first time I walked the course about 10:15, and they announced that the change had been made... and it was clear how the course was being run from the 20 cars that ran the course before him.  Dunno what the hell he was thinking.  But... someone decided to give him a rerun.  I guess I should have kept my head in the sand all morning botched the finish and gotten myself a rerun, too!

Anyway, after all that, I took my run a little conservatively to ensure that I didn't completely botch it.  Made one mistake.  I was SO set up for the exit of the decreasing radius turn, that I almost shot between some cones and cut the turn too TIGHT!  So, I lost a little bit correcting my course there.  Otherwise, I did okay.  The course was actually pretty fun to drive.  There was nobody else lined up to run at the time... I asked if I could take another run for fun, but they wouldn't let me.  Dammit.

Okay, gotta go get ready to try to get some photos of Jeff on track.