Chesapeake Region
Autocross In Review Words: Greg Hartke
I had an interesting experience at Potomac’s Autocross #2 in early May at Summit Point. That event was Saturday May 7th, which was the second day of the big rain event we had in early May. With AX, rain doesn’t matter, the show must go on, so race we did. There were a bunch of cancellations, but truth to tell, it was a lot of fun. There was heavy rain early when I first arrived at Summit Point, but it tapered off to light -to-moderate rain by the time racing started and for the rest of the day, so it wasn’t too bad. It was chilly, too, with the temperature steady at right around 50° F all day. A lot of drivers commented about how scary it was driving to the venue – they noticed even then that grip was really lacking, and their cars were not happy with the cold, wet conditions. I didn’t really have that re-
action driving out to Summit Point, though. It felt just about as I would have expected for very wet roads, but then again, it’s not as if I was pushing it very hard. POT usually has 75 to 80 drivers and runs 3 heats at their events. I was in the second heat and conditions really didn’t change much throughout the whole day, so there was no advantage or disadvantage to any particular heat. When my opportunity came up, I went out on my first run and… Wow! I was astonished at how little grip I had. For those of you who haven’t driven the Washington circuit at Summit Point where POT does their AX, the surface is a bit slick with less grip than we have at our PGS venue. This, though, was off the charts. I couldn’t roll on the power without spinning the wheels and the car was twitching and slewing all over the place. I adapted a bit on the second run, but it was still virtually impossible for me to put up a decent time. The worst part was my inability to use the throttle properly, but I received advice that improved that situation. On my second run, starter Roland P. told me that Chris N. had told him that the best way to combat the poor grip was to turn off Sport Mode so that the throttle response was less abrupt. That didn’t occur to me because I always run in Sport mode. It’s the first thing I do when I start the car at any time because I like the quicker response. The advice made a lot of sense to me, so I tried it on my third run and immediately found the car much easier to drive in the extant (rather extreme) conditions. Go figure. Of course, I immediately passed the word to some of my other racing buddies in this heat (all fast drivers). They all tried it, and all found that it was a
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