March 25 - SCCA Autocross

Those driving books I bought a couple of weeks ago MUST be helping...










(Photos courtesy of Jon and Erin)

This past Sunday was the Championship Runoffs for the 2006 Hawaii SCCA autocross season and the course for this race was another great course for the limited area we have in the Aloha Stadium parking lot.

BMW's are renowned for their braking and I used it to full effect on 2 of the hair pin turns on the course. In fact, as described in the Going Faster book, I tried to trail brake into these hairpins, much more than I ever did in the past, and I was surprised how much the front end squatted down and dug in to those turns!

I also learned that my car is DEFINITELY faster with the traction control FULLY disengaged. In the trade off for a higher chance of a transitional tail happy spin (did it twice that day), you get much better throttle response, especially out of the slow hairpin turns.

My best run of the day, when it counted, was 41.100 seconds. But during the fun runs, I got down to 40.037 seconds with the traction control fully off! UNBELIEVABLY, sans traction control I got over 1 second faster...and all this time I've been running with the traction control only in the semi-off posisiton...

Result: D - Stock 1st Place, for the first time! Guess my tires aren't holding me back as much as I thought!

Overall Results: http://sccahawaii.org/3-25-07.pdf

To Mycarpage.blogspot.com

Shhhh....Secrets....

Just got these in from Amazon today...maybe...I'm hoping, they will help in the next autocrosses coming up on March 26th and April 8th.

The March 26th date is the Championship for the 2006 season and I will be running my stocker in the D-Stock class again. Maybe these books can help me overcome my Bimmer's lack of HP, tire width, auto trans, etc. etc. etc....lalalala. I would have much preferred running in the "true" STS street tire class.

The April 8th even is the beginning of the new season and I'm still debating whether to run my wagon in STS or the Eunos in STS2 or CSP...

Titles:

Going Faster! Master the art of Race Driving by Skip Barber (270 pgs) - this book is VERY technical (ie, more words than pictures), but, being an engineer, I love it!

Speed Secrets 2 More Prof. Race Driving Tech. by Ross Bentley (150 pgs) - seems pretty basic for a driving standpoint, with some useless stuff, for me anyways, about marketing yourself and being accessible to fans.

Speed Secrets 3 Mental Strategies to Maximize Your Racing Performance by Ross Bentley (150 pgs) - now this book looks very interesting because it deals primarily with the mental aspect of driving. From a quick scan, many of the points can be applied to other aspect of your life too...more like a driving psychology book.

Of the 3 books, I think the Going Faster and Secrets 3 books will DEFINITELY help in taking it to the next levels...I just hope I can get through them by the 26th...