Autocross School and Event #3 & 4

Greg Hartke

I apologize for not getting a column out last month. Some crises arose at the wrong time and I just didn’t have time to get the writing done, which means this column contains reports for all three of the events that have taken place since my last column. Lots to write about! The Chesapeake Introduction to Autocross is normally held in the spring as the first event of the year so that newcomers have the opportunity to come out and attend the School then have the whole season ahead of them. This year was different. AX Co-chair Brad Martinez and I decided to hold the School later in the year (September 11th) to give the pandemic a chance to calm down (which it did) enough to allow us to hold the event. As usual, I was carefully watching the weather forecast and was certainly relieved when the day turned out to be warm and dry. Phew! We would have held the event even if it were raining, of course, but dry conditions were certainly preferable. Preparations for the AX School are always interesting and this year was no different. The main challenge this year was rustling up instructors for the event. That’s always a challenge, but this year was a bit tougher. The problem was the schedule – instructors are more likely to be available in the spring than in midSeptember. Actually, I had arranged in the spring to have sufficient instructors for the September event, but plans change (quite understandably!) over such a span and some of the instructors were no longer available as September approached. With some quick last-minute work, we wound up with 14 instructors. Brad and I typically don’t do in-car instruction at the School (though we like to get in on the fun!) because we need to be available to run the event, which means there were actually only 12 instructors available to work with the students. Brad and I had decided to assign instructors differently than we had in the past with each instructor this year working the entire day with two students (instead of jumping in and out of different cars all day), one assigned to Group 1 and driving Heat 1 and a second assigned to Group 2 and driving Heat 2. (The Potomac Chapter did something similar this year and that’s where I took the inspiration for structuring our own School after working the POT School in the spring.) With only 12 instructors available (not including Brad and me, who could instruct in a pinch), we perforce had to limit the number of students to 24 instead of the planned 30. We may not have had the numbers, but we sure had the quality. This was a really great group of instructors. As it turned out, we needed 14 because two of the instructors had to stop working during the morning

exercises when they developed motion sickness. Motion sickness??? You better believe it! No fault to the instructors because that’s always a concern for situations like this and it’s almost inevitable that one or two will be stricken. Happens every time (and yes, it happened at the POT AX School this year, too) when you have instructors constantly experiencing all those transient gees as passengers in student cars. The good news is that Brad and I were available to jump in and, what the heck… We had a good time doing so. The affected instructors were able to take over again by the time we got to the afternoon AX, which was good because that meant Brad and I could go back to keeping things on track. The day began early for Brad and me, arriving about 5:00 AM with Mark Hubley arriving shortly thereafter with the trailer full of AX supplies. Brad and Mark immediately dropped the cones out on the parking lot, then began building the exercises while I worked to put everything else together. I was fortunate because POT AXer and instructor Bob Simmons showed up about 6:00 AM to help me. Together we got everything set up and in good order, while Brad and Mark did the same with the set up for the exercises. Brad began the festivities with a Chalk Talk that started right on schedule at 8:30. After the Chalk Talk, there was a driver’s meeting, after which the students went out to drive the three exercises: Double skidpad; Combination slalom course and threshold braking; AX course section – a mini-course so that students could practice finding the proper driving line.

There were 8 students at each exercise, 4 from Group 1 (who drove heat 1 in the afternoon AX) and 4 from Group 2 (who drove heat 2). In addition, there were 4 instructors: each instructor was assigned one student from Group 1 and one from Group 2, then worked with those students and those students only for the entire event. The way this worked was that the Group 1 students ran the exercise for 25 minutes with their instructors while the Group 2 students observed, then the instructors switched to the Group 2 students who also ran the exercise for 25 minutes while the Group 1 students observed. At the end of the exercise period, the students then drove with their instructors to the next exercise. Simple! Since this event is a long day for everyone, it’s important to try to keep everything on schedule as nearly as possible, not wanting to make a long day even longer. I’m happy to say we were able to do this and we

School (cont’d)

finished the exercises just about exactly when we expected to do so. Amazing! ;) When the exercises were completed, the students took a lunch break while Brad and I assembled the course for the afternoon AX. Actually, I helped with that only briefly. Before long, Brad shooed me off to the trailer to get timing set up while he finished with the course and it didn’t take long before we were ready to go with the afternoon festivities. With 24 students (far fewer than the 65 we have at our regular AX events), the drivers were able to get 8 runs in each of the two heats in a really short time: the first heat took just about an hour and the second about 70 minutes. With a quick changeover between the heats, we were able to finish the event early (before 5:00 PM), with all the students getting plenty of seat time during the day to hone their skills. Great stuff! Tell you what… The progress by the students as the day progressed was really impressive. There’s just no way to get this kind of experience on the road – you never drive your car that close to the edge of its performance envelope in the real world! That’s the cool thing about AX. You have the opportunity to really push your car in a way that’s very safe. As I often say about AX, you’re driving the car the way it was meant to be driven and the only things you’re wearing are the brakes and tires. The students gained a lot of experience and confidence with the exercises, then took it to the full course in the afternoon and were just outstanding. I can’t thank the crew of instructors enough for their hard work. The instructors were nothing short of wonderful, putting in a very long day to help the students with hardly a respite and I was very proud of them for their unstinting contribution. We all owe them a debt of gratitude for donating their time to us for the event. The students should also be very proud of the way they enthusiastically applied themselves to the exercises and did such a great job driving in the AX. I’m sure there were some nerves when they started, but they quickly got the hang of it and gained considerable confidence in what they could do with their car. By all accounts, the 2021 AX School was a big success. Thanks to all for attending and those of us who were running the event certainly hope the students enjoyed themselves and learned a lot. Needless to say, we also hope to see our students come out and race with us in the future!

Greg Hartke

We had a bit of a respite after the AX School before our next race. With all the problems finding dates for our AX events this year, I was unable to schedule another AX during September, so our next event (AX#3) was held on Saturday October 9th. Tell you what… I was nervous about this one! In the week running up to the event, the weather was looking a little sketchy with showers in the forecast, then a couple of days prior, the forecast became much more favorable. In the end, race day was cloudy and coolish, so I breathed a sigh of relief. ;)

The first couple of AX races this year had simple courses that resulted in very fast times. Course complexity usually progresses as the season goes on, but with only four events this year, we jumped right into a much longer and a bit more complicated course for AX#3, which must have been interesting for those graduating from the AX School to their first full AX. With the repaving of the lot at PGS, we’re now able to use more of the lot surface so that course designs that are longer than what we used in previous years are now possible. Brad designed the course for this race after some comments saying that while the first couple of courses were fun, they were somewhat short and fast. Result for this event: a long course. I thought the course used for AX#3 was lots of fun (and heard the same from a bunch of drivers) and enjoyed the long lap, so was entertained overhearing a couple of drivers complaining to each other about the course design. They preferred fast, minimalist courses, whereas this course mixed fast sections with technical sections. You can never please everyone. ;) Actually, the start of the course was quite interesting. Hammer it out of the start box into a full-circle skid pad, roll on the power on exit as quickly as possible and (if you picked the line properly) run flat out (or nearly so) from the skid pad, through the channels, and down to the lower part of the course. There you were braking so hard your eyeballs popped out, turning into another skidpad with a downhill, off-camber entry. You better slow properly there or you’ll eat your front tires up with understeer. Quite a fun start to a long course! Because of the long course, Brad and I opted to do 5 runs instead of our more normal 6 to keep the day from being too long. (Each run was taking about half an hour or so.) With 5 runs and 60 drivers, we finished at 2:50 – not too bad. FTD was won by Michael Tavenner with 67.788 sec, also winning Class S5. Eric Core was 2nd overall among the P-cars with 70.740 sec, winning Class S4. Scott Borden was 3rd P-car overall with 71.951

Autocross (cont’d)

sec, which put him second in S5. Damon Lowney was right behind Scott overall, winning Class I with 72.664 sec and Jim Musgrave was right behind him with 72.814 sec, for 2nd in Class I and 5th overall for the P-cars. Among the classes not mentioned so far, S1 was won by James Beavan in his 924S, S2 by Jim Althoff, and S3 by Frank Tedeschi. P1 was won by Darrell Pope and P2 by Brad Martinez, who had some mechanical difficulties (lost a nut on his throttle linkage when we were doing the course safety runs), but managed to get things back together in time to get in 3 runs. Phong Nguyen topped P3, Craig Schnelli won P4, and Roland Pinto was fastest in P5.

PCA Member Dan Ruddick was out having fun at this event and I had a chance to chat with him about the AX School (which he attended). Though a newcomer to AX, Dan is a relatively advanced driver, so I was quite interested in his perspective. He told me he really enjoyed the AX School and that the ability to repeat the exercises many times with an instructor really helped develop the proper technique. I thought this little tidbit would be interesting to anyone thinking about getting into AX in the future. Keep in mind that we expect to be holding the AX School in the spring in 2022, so be on the lookout for the opportunity to get the adrenaline flowing! With AX#3 in the books, we were flowing right into AX#4 (the final event of the season) the following Saturday, October 16th. I had no choice except to schedule events on back-to-back weekends because those were the only dates available, but I was worried about it, not knowing if we would get a good turnout. The good news is that we did indeed fill the registration for the event and we wound up with 60 drivers showing up to race that day. This one was a little dicey. I had been carefully studying the weather forecast all week because rain was expected that day, starting sometime in the afternoon. (The forecast probably caused a few no-shows, too.) We don’t stop racing for rain (though a downpour might cause a bit of a pause), but we do stop for thunderstorms for obvious safety reasons and those were very much in the forecast. I was really sweating over this one! Ideally, it would be best to have a level playing field with both heats run under dry conditions, but as always, it’s a

Autocross (cont’d)

Greg Hartke

bit of a crap shoot when the rain would actually arrive. I was carefully monitoring the forecast model predictions as well as the heat timing and after 3 runs in the first heat, decided to do 5 runs because it looked as if that would allow everyone to be able to drive in dry conditions. That was my best guess, so then it was just a matter of seeing how things worked in the real world. Gulp. ;) Astonishingly, I got it right. Who’d’ve thunk it? ;) Everyone was able to complete their racing in dry conditions (IIRC, we finished at 1:35) and in fact it still looked pretty nice when we ended. In fact, when we finished, I was wondering if I had made the right call – maybe we would have had time for 6 runs. By that time, it didn’t matter anymore because we did 5 runs and that was that. What was interesting was that while we were packing the trailer, some really nasty looking clouds started blowing in. As it turned out, the rain started maybe 20 minutes after we had everything packed up. Phew! Much better to put everything away dry because if it had been packed wet, we would have had to dry it all out to avoid developing mold and mildew in the trailer while it sat for the next 5 months!

So the timing was just about perfect and everyone had a great time. Couldn’t ask for more! FTD was won by Michael Tavenner (47.387 sec), which also placed him 1st in Class S5. Wil Cruz was 2nd overall running in Guest Class with 48.325 sec, followed by Eric Core at 3rd overall with 49.183 sec, which was tops in S4. Damon Lowney has been working hard on his car (did you read his great article in the latest Panorama?) and really seems to have it pretty well dialed-in (and is driving very well!) because he was the 3rd P-car overall at 49.576 sec for the win in Class I. 4th overall among the P-cars was Marcus Frank at 49.910 sec, which left him 2nd in Class I behind Damon. Rounding out the top 5 overall among the P-cars was Craig Schnelli with 49.993 sec, winning Class P4. Among the classes not mentioned so far, S1 was won by Maria Abrams, S2 by Chris Zach, and S3 by Verden Ness. I hadn’t seen Verden and Chris for two years (i.e., pre-pandemic), so it was nice to see them out with us again. P1 was topped by Darrell Pope (which is no surprise – Darrell is a super driver in his very analog machine of choice!) and P3 was topped by Slava Burmaka, edging out Meilyng Burmaka by just over 0.2 sec. (Slava had put a lot of work into modification to their car last winter and he tells me there will be even more this winter!) Tom Divilio was fastest in P5. I’ve taken my camera to every AX event for the past 3 years and I don’t think I personally have ever taken a single picture. Pathetic, although I did run over the camera in my Cayman once. Pretty sharp, huh? I musty

Autocross (cont’d)

have only hit it a glancing blow because it survived. ;) I have gotten others to use the camera to take photos for me at times, but I’m normally too busy to even think about it. At AX#4, Tom Zdanowicz took some pictures using his own equipment and was kind enough to supply them to us for your enjoyment. Thanks a bunch, Tom!

The highlight of the day for me came (strangely enough) before we even started racing. During setup, I popped into the trailer and found 3 containers of home-made chocolate chip cookies, one each for Brad, Meilyng, and me. These were courtesy of Lisa Gritti, thanking us for our efforts running AX and with wishes that we wouldn’t starve to death in the trailer while we were working all day. That was so nice! Thanks, Lisa! Unfortunately, Brad was absent (on travel for work), so do you think the poor guy even smelled one of Lisa’s wonderful home-made chocolate chips? Nope. Meilyng and I shamelessly split ‘em. I admit we did parcel a few out to coworkers in the trailer, though. As a connoisseur of chocolate chip cookies (and who isn’t?), I can state with authority that these were perfectly cooked, too. ;) I have good news on the personal front: my model 981 Cayman S is back in action after being down for 2 months waiting for parts for a relatively simple repair. I’ve been driving my Cooper S, which is fun and interesting to drive a momentum car again (though I would wish it had better tires), but I sure am happy to have my Cayman back, even if it did return home the week after our last event.

Speaking of tires, now we all have to decide what to do about tires for the 2022 AX season. Hmm. Most serious AX competitors have been running Bridgestone RE-71R’s for a number of years (they’ve certainly been the AX tire of choice!), but Bridgestone stopped production of this model and the tires are no longer to be had. What are we going to do??? I have a couple of ideas, but I still don’t know exactly which way I’ll jump and I’m certainly not the only one wondering. That choice is going to make this off-season more interesting than it needs to be, that’s for sure. There you have it! The 2021 CHS Autocross season is complete! Brad, Meilyng, and I would certainly like to thank you for coming out to race with us and be assured that your participation is what makes it so much fun. I’m also going to have to apologize in advance: I try hard to learn names and remember as many of you as possible, but now I’m about to enter into a 5-month break where I won’t see most of you and that’s tough on an old man’s memory. Please bear with me when I see you again next season and have to cudgel my memory to put names to faces. I’m certainly not getting any younger. ;) I’ll manage, but it’ll take time! Brad, Meilyng, and I will very much be looking forward to seeing you in 2022. Have a great winter! Greg Hartke 5-13-2014: 1965 356C Loaded in Trailer for the Journey Home to Maryland