Autocross Update: May 2023

Chesapeake Region

By:GregHartke;Photos:JimMckee

This last month has been eventful, that’s for sure. There were two Autocross events this month: on Sunday April 2nd, we held Instructor Day (in the morning) and Test & Tune (in the afternoon). Because this is a double event with both morning and afternoon sessions, it makes for a very long day for those of us involved with both. On top of that, we held the massively important Introduction to Autocross (aka the AX School) on Saturday April 22nd. The AX School is a really complicated event over a long day and hugely important because, after all, this is how we get newcomers involved in the hobby.

With two events on the same day (I-Day and Test & Tune), there was certainly a lot of prep work to be done. This was the first time I had undertaken all the prep work on my own, but it went quite smoothly due to the excellent documentation that was left behind. Thanks, Meilyng!

Instructor Day is a big thank you for the instructors who work at our events and at the AX School. Basically, we invite them to come out, break them up into two groups, and drive for a couple/three hours on the course that’s being used for the Test & Tune with timing set up so they can see how they’re doing. We don’t typically have a lot of Instructors showing up, so they get lots of runs and have lots of fun. It’s a great way for them to knock off the rust and prepare for the season.

Interestingly, I was racing at a Potomac AX the day before at Summit Point and from there managed to get three more Instructors to come out to our event Sunday morning. Funny situation: they had all been invited, but for one reason or another, had missed (or had forgotten to respond to) the invitation. All good – we wound up with 16 drivers in the morning, which meant a lot of fun over the two-and-a-half to three hour driving session. Several POT instructors mentioned how much they appreciated the Test & Tune we do at CHS to get the season started, as well as the later-in-the-season start to our events. It was a bit chilly and really windy early in the day but wasn’t bad in the afternoon. Sure, beat racing in the snow like they did at the first Potomac AX in early March. ;)

Keep in mind also that this is an opportunity for us to test our equipment and procedures because a Test & Tune is not a competitive event. It’s practice for experienced racers who wants to register to come out and drive. This is an excellent way to start the season and we get a lot of non-PCA members anxious to come out and get their season started, too. Co-chair Mark Hubley had opted to use a slightly modified (i.e., a bit more complicated) version of the AX School course for the Test & Tune to try it out and it was a lot of fun to drive.

There’s always extra anxiety around the first event of the season because we haven’t run one since the previous year and it’s always crazy getting everything ready for the first event. When I left home for Prince George’s Stadium in Bowie (at 3:50 AM), I had a nagging feeling that I had forgotten something, but for the life of me I couldn’t figure out what it was. I put it down to opening-day jitters and headed off. Two-thirds of the way down to PGS (which is an hour away), it suddenly popped in my head that I had forgotten the satchel with all the radio equipment and batteries for the timing sensors. D’oh!!! Well, the good news is that I didn’t need this equipment immediately, so when I arrived at PGS, I texted Marilyn (then called her at a more seemly hour) to ask her to bring the equipment I had left home. She was bringing down items later that I couldn’t fit in my car, so it was no big deal. She’s seen me do this sort of thing before, so it was no shock. Marilyn saved the day again! ;)

Those opening-day jitters manifested in other ways, too. About the time I realized I had forgotten the radios and batteries, I noticed from the dashboard display that my gas mileage was significantly lower than usual for the drive down to PGS when there’s no traffic. What’s up with that??? I eventually noticed that I was driving down the highway in 4th gear instead of 6th. D’oh! Yessir, I was really making a mess of it. I hadn’t even arrived at PGS and I was already having a bad day. Look at it this way: the only way to go was up. Fortunately, the rest of the AX team wasn’t having the same difficulties I was. ;)

We had a bunch of equipment updates for this season, and I was anxious to make sure everything worked properly. To begin with, the repaired timing display worked perfectly. We also had fixed our wireless network up (it wasn’t working properly most of last year) and that now works perfectly. With the increased range of the wi-fi network, it was great to have the starter able to queue the cars again. This had been impossible when the wi-fi was down because the hotspot had insufficient range, which meant we had to have a separate worker close to the trailer queueing the cars, which can lead to confusion and mistakes.

As mentioned last month, the live timing website on the internet is down for updates (completion date: indeterminate), so we were testing our local network alternative. The web server running locally was configured to allow participants to access it via the now-repaired wi-fi so that everyone could see their times. Timing was not on an external site, of course, but everyone could see the times on the local site. Good enough. We had some problems initially in which the local AX Time web server was not talking to the Race America timing console, but that was resolved fairly quickly.

In another big equipment update, we had gotten rid of our iPads and bought new Samsung Tablets. I had updated and configured these before the event, and we had no trouble at all with these. They worked perfectly. Lastly, the PA system gave us some problems last year, but we now have it working perfectly for this season.

I had stopped by PGS a month or so before the Test & Tune for a quick check and, while the surface was in excellent shape, there was a lot of debris in the form of detritus from tailgating as well as tree and brush scraps. We’re paying a fancy price to use that facility, so I decided to contact PGS and ask them to clean the lot for us before our first event. They were very accommodating and agreed to do so (for all I know, it’s possible they were going to clean it before the baseball season started, anyway) and on event day, I was pleased to see that the lot was in great shape.

As usual with the Test & Tune, registration was full. I capped it at 40, accepted 42, and we had 2 no-shows. Perfect! Participants were very happy because we gave them 8 runs (which is a lot, and AXers are always happy with lots of runs) and with two heats of 20 drivers each, we spent just about 90 minutes on each heat. Racing completed at just about 4:30 PM and the participants were extremely helpful in getting all the equipment up to the trailer for us to pack away.

Co-chair Mark Hubley and AX team members Pinto Soin, John Cho, and Phong Nguyen were nothing short of magnificent. These guys were there for the whole day starting before 5:00 AM (they drove in the morning session) until the bitter end (about 5:00 PM) and (as always) jumped up to do absolutely anything and everything they were asked. Can’t even begin to tell you how great they are! It’s really a pleasure to work with this team. We’re becoming a well-oiled machine!

As already mentioned, the AX School was on the 22nd, three weeks after the Test & Tune. As course designer and Chalk Talk Instructor, Mark Hubley wanted to tweak the exercises for the AX School this season. He decided to switch the locations of the skidpad and mini-course exercises (with the repaving of the lot a couple of years ago, he could make a larger mini-course where the skidpad used to be) and change the double skidpad to a single skidpad, so that’s what we did. Worked well! Mark was also presenting his Chalk Talk for the first time, so he had to do a lot of prep work to take the existing version and make it his own.

There was (as always) lots of prep work for the AX School, but it all went very well. As usual, I had badgered our loyal corps of Instructor to help out and (also as usual) they had responded wonderfully so that I had two Instructors for each Student. Perfect! And then came the shocker…

When I set up the event in MSR, I had capped the registration at 30 when I cloned the event from last year. As we approached 30 entries, I was considering increasing it to 32 or 33 (based on the number of Instructors available) and looked more closely at the registration. Imagine my horror to discover I actually had 41 Students registered! It seems when I cloned the event, I had inadvertently left an avenue open for registration (to non-PCA Members) that resulted in them not being tallied in the reported registration numbers. In an absolute panic I went into overdrive to dig up more Instructors to maintain the desired 2-to-1 ratio and while it was looking dicey right up to the end, sure enough, our dedicated group of Instructors came through in spades. This little contretemps, however, did not do my BP any good. ;)

Then there was the weather… You may not recall that day, but the forecast was great for the morning, but strong thunderstorms were forecast for the afternoon. The most important part of the day was the morning driving exercises and they were forecast to have good weather, but we were very worried about the actual race in the afternoon.

The day started in an interesting fashion. I had received an email from the PGS event director Friday evening assuring me all was ready, but when we got to the venue, we discovered that the extension cord used to provide power (it’s normally threaded out through the box office window) was there, but not plugged in. Grrr. Yes, we could use the generator, but that was not what I would consider the optimal solution. As it turned out, we didn’t actually use the generator. The Amazing Pinto (his new title ;) ) climbed the security fence into the lobby and plugged the PGS extension into an available socket down the corridor.

Imagine how worried I was about venue security while Pinto climbed that fence – if an alarm went off and the police showed up, what was I going to tell them??? I still don’t know! Anyway, no alarm sounded, though it must have looked interesting on security camera footage. ;) Pinto had to go down the corridor far enough that the extension cord was then too short for our usual usage, but we added the extension we normally use for the PA system (we didn’t have the personnel to support an announcer that day, anyway) and that took care of our problem.

One of our instructors couldn’t make it after a medical problem surfaced. That was a potential disaster, but the stars aligned in such a fashion that it was easy to rearrange things, aided by a couple of Student no-shows and an extra Student who was notified of an opening then and there to come join the school to bring us back to exactly 2 Students per Instructor. Can you imagine? What luck!

We actually worked hard to get ahead of schedule by making sure the students arrived early as well as rearranging the schedule from the previous year to be more efficient. By the time we started the driving exercises, we were 30 to 40 minutes ahead, which was excellent with that bad weather coming in the afternoon. The exercises went very well with the students absolutely killing it and by all appearances having a great time. (At least everyone I asked said they were having a blast!)

After the exercises, the Students and Instructors broke for lunch (excellent Potbelly sandwiches!) while the AX team went to work to convert the exercises to a course and get all the timing gear set up. After Mark and I did the safety runs in my car (tweaking the course into shape), we were ready to start racing.

A very annoying problem arose when the times coming in on the Race America timing system would not cross over to the PC. We had this problem at the Test & Tune, but Phong thought he fixed it by making sure we cabled to the proper port on the PC. (The software is hard coded to use a specific COM port.) I worked on this for a while as the action was proceeding, but in the end had to put all the times into the AXTime software manually as they came in. This made for an incredibly hectic period while I worked to catch up to the 25+ runs that had taken place while I was troubleshooting (with weather coming in, there was no time to hold up the race), but I got there and continued inputting the times manually for the remainder of the timed runs.

I normally like to give the students a lot of runs (my goal is always 8), but with bad weather imminent, I had to stop after 3 runs for the first heat. I actually told the students this would be a pause because of the potential for lightning from the incoming storm and sent them off to sit in their cars. The timing for the stoppage was perfect because minutes after I sent them to shelter-in-place, the heavens opened, and the lightning crackled. I don’t need to tell you about the precip there that day, but I will say it was just as drenching in Bowie as it was everywhere else. I was eyeing the radar and forecast advisories (which predicted the chance of lightning for hours) and eventually decided to pull the plug.

When we did pull the plug, the rain was no longer torrential, so I told the students we would continue with fun runs (with their instructors!), though with no one on the course to set cones. Mark and I worked start and stop to keep things under control. (We took down the timing display before the rain because I didn’t want a repeat of the Drenchfest from last year that wiped it out.) As it turned out, the Amazing Pinto went out on the course to shag cones while Mark and I worked as I said, and John and Marilyn started collecting equipment for storage in the trailer.

Believe it or not, the instructor-accompanied fun runs in the rain turned out to be wildly popular. The students who remained got a lot of runs and would have gone on forever if I hadn’t stopped the proceedings at 4:30. (I can’t speak for the others, but I was bloody well freezing because the temp had dropped, it was windy, and I was soaked. ;) ) The students were amazed how fast they could go in such wet conditions. It was an interesting opportunity to drive hard in the wet (very wet) without the pressure of competition – I think that’s why they enjoyed it so much. It was a great opportunity to learn car control in difficult circumstances.

Mark, Pinto, and John (Phong couldn’t make this one) were magnificent, as always, and the instructors did a superb job. Marilyn brought down the items I couldn’t fit in my Cayman, bought extra ice, and picked up the lunch, as well as helping with end-of-event packing. I was thrilled to see CHS PCA Photographer Jim McKee show up, too. Really appreciated him coming by to take pictures, a few of which accompany this article. As always, there were challenges, but the team always finds a way. What a great bunch!

Tires. I keep talking about tires. There’s a reason for that, of course. In competitive AX, tire choice is a make-orbreak proposition. Last month, I mentioned that the Yokohama ADVAN A052’s I had ordered were delayed still further and it was apparent that the estimated ship date (June 1st) was no better than wishful thinking. I finally got fed up and threw in the towel. I ordered a set of 19” wheels (Forged One FF05’s in Satin Graphite) with Bridgestone RE71RS tires in sizes 285/35R-19 for the rear and 245/40R-19 for the front, giving me the same rolling diameter front and rear. Testing the exercises and the course at the AX School was my first opportunity to drive these tires in anger and they felt great. Haven’t had anything like that in 2 years. ‘Bout time! Mark did the same thing: cancelled his order for the Yokos and bought the RE-71RS’s. We both drove them in the POT AX at Summit Point on 4/30 (in the rain) and they performed excellently. For all of you still wondering about tires, the indications are that these are now the tire to use. Availability is far superior to the Yokos and performance is excellent. I know other top-notch drivers using these tires and everyone is happy with them. Sure, am glad to put that to rest! It’s been quite an odyssey.

As I write this, CHS AX#1 at Ripken Stadium is only 5 days away. The registration is full (happy about that!) and we have a substantial Waitlist. Mark has already given me the course (looks like fun!) and the weather forecast is quite favorable. The POT AX chairs are probably jealous about that. They have had three autocrosses, two in the rain and one with rain and snow. That’s what they get for starting their racing season too early. ;)

Here we go! Looking forward to seeing you soon at the races!

Greg Hartke CHS AX Chair