Chesapeake Region
Autocross In Review Words: Greg Hartke; Photos: Jim Mckee
Since I wrote my column for the last Patter, we’ve had two Autocross event, the Instructor Day / Test & Tune on March 20th and Introduction to Autocross on April 2nd. The AX School is such a complicated event (and as I write this, it was only two days ago) that I’ve forgotten the details of what happened at the first event. I’ll bet that wouldn’t have happened in my younger days. ;) The first of these was a dual event. In the morning, we gave the instructors who will be teaching at the AX School the opportunity to come out and knock off the rust to prepare them for (and thank them for their contribution to) the AX School. In the afternoon, we held a Test & Tune, which was a practice event for anyone who wished to come out and get ready for the competitive season. Timing was set up and we gave participants as many runs as we could manage in the time available (which was 7 for that day). Great fun!
What I remember most about that day was that it was cold and windy. Brrr! I also recall watching Venus, Saturn, and Mars rising together in the dark morning sky before sunrise. Very pretty in a deep blue sky! The International Space Station also flew by overhead while it was still dark. Some of us find that to be fun. ;) Anyway, the cold temperatures made for reduced grip, so we made sure we warned everyone at the T&T to be careful ‘til their tires heated up. As befits an early season event, the course was relatively simple and quite fast in places. The event went very well and everyone seemed to have a great time. It was a great warm up for the season and a good way for those of us running the AX events to get back in the swing of things. Hey, we need practice, too. ;) As always, Mark Hubley deserves special thanks for bringing the trailer with all our equipment from his farm (where we store the trailer), showing up at 5:00 AM with Brad and me to start assembling the event. (He does this for every AX event! Can you imagine???) Special thanks also to Pinto Soin for his help in showing up at that ridiculous hour to help me set up and to John Cho for also showing up when he should be sleeping to help Brad assemble the course. You can’t imagine how much that eases the earlymorning burden of getting things ready on time! Then there was the AX School. We had quite a dance this year with registration. I didn’t have as many instructors as I wanted,
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