20 minute read
Autocross June Article
Chesapeake Region
Autocross Re-cap
Words By: Greg Hartke, Photos: Tom Zdanowicz
I somehow managed to miss getting an article written for the last Patter, so this one is going to be a little long as I try to catch up. It’s been a busy period. Besides three autocross events since my last installment (Intro to Autocross, AX#1, and AX#2), Marilyn and I went out to Ohio to view the total solar eclipse on April 8th. The weather was not perfect (we had some high, wispy clouds), but it was good and we were excited to have had the opportunity to enjoy the spectacle.
I started in astronomy when I was knee high to a cricket and have seen everything imaginable (and some things unimaginable to the non-specialist), but though my life-list of astro events is extensive, I’ve never seen a total eclipse. Until now. It’s amazing how much darker the landscape gets during the last seconds before totality and (of course) during totality. Quite surreal. But what’s totally weird during totality is looking up in the sky and seeing a black hole surrounded by a silvery nimbus (the solar corona) where the Sun would be. In addition, there were pinky red solar prominences visible to the naked-eye around the limb of the Moon, which was a distinct bonus. What a scene!
I took one of my telescopes with me and we (quite safely) viewed the eclipse during the partial phases. I also took a few pix through the scope during the partial phases and have included one here to show you what it looked like that day. This picture was taken just before the Moon covered the major sunspot that was visible. You can see the high haze that was present, but it was still a great experience. To add a little PCA flavor, this was the first road trip with Marilyn’s new-to-her 2017 Macan GTS. That certainly made for a fun drive!
The timing for the eclipse (Monday April 8th) was not good at all because the most complex autocross event of the year (Intro to Autocross, aka the AX School) was held the following Saturday, April 13th. There’s always a huge amount of prep work that has to be done for this event and I was basically unable to do anything significant from the preceding Friday thru Tuesday when we got back home. Of course, I got done what I could before and during the trip, but there’s always a lot to do that can’t be done until right before the event. The good news is that everything worked out just fine!
What makes this event especially difficult is trying to coordinate Instructors for the Students. The registration is capped at 36 and it filled early with an extensive waitlist. Thirty-six Students meant we needed 18 Instructors. Ideally, Co-chair Mark Hubley and I are held back and don’t instruct. Instead, we spend our time keeping things organized and moving smoothly, as well as being available in case any of the Instructors develop motion sickness and can’t continue. (And yes, that happens, though thankfully, not this year.) I also prefer to have one other Instructor in reserve to help out on an asneeded basis.
This year was especially tough because there was a DE at VIR that weekend, which meant an automatic loss of a number of Instructors who would otherwise have been available for the School. Let me tell you I was really sweating it, but in the end (and at the last minute), I was able to make some key additions that brought the number of available Instructors to 21, which was dead nuts perfect. Phew! I was certainly relieved!
School day dawned quite chilly and a very blustery wind added a layer of difficulty (it actually moved cones and blew them over at times!), but we managed. In the end, the event went very well. Co-chair Mark Hubley (who tows the equipment trailer from his farm) didn’t have to go back to get his car, so the cone placement for the exercises was done more quickly than for our usual AX event with the result that we were able to get ahead of the schedule. That’s a good thing because it meant I could allocate more driving time for the exercises.
The day started off with Mark providing 45 minutes or so of schooling to the Students via his Chalk Talk, which is the classroom portion of the AX School. While Mark was busy with the Students, I walked through the exercises with the Instructors, discussing what to emphasize and how the exercises were to be run. We keep the Chalk Talk short because the emphasis is on seat time, so as soon as Mark was done, the Students gridded up and we got right into the driving exercises. Since we had the right number of Instructors, Mark, Phong Nguyen, and I kept things rolling rather than Instructing. With 3 exercises, the Students were broken up into 3 groups of 12, then further subdivided into A and B groups with a single Instructor assigned to one driver in group A and one in B.
When driving the exercises, group A started and we cycled through all the Students in that group while the group B students watched. When the time came to changeover, the Instructors swapped to their other students and the group B Students drove.
While all this was going on, I was carefully noting the times on my master schedule so that we could keep everything running smoothly. The Students were scheduled for an hour at each exercise, which broke down into 25 minutes of driving for each group and 5 minutes for the changeovers. Because we started early, I was able to extend the exercises to 30 minutes for each group of students instead of 25 minutes. Hey, extra seat time is always good! If you think all this seems complicated, that’s because it is. Amazingly enough, it all works out quite well, though.
I typically spend most of my time at the skidpad exercise at the School because that’s the toughest one to administer while in this case Mark and Phong were keeping an eye on the other two exercises. Things were going so smoothly, though, that I was able to ask Phong to take over at the skidpad while I focused on the overall. I always talk to the drivers as they cycled through to see how they were making out and every time I asked, the answer was always the same – they were having a blast and learning a lot.
The Students always start off driving a bit tentatively (perfectly normal!) and it’s getting past this that’s so important to progress. I had emphasized to the Instructors in the Instructor meeting that I wanted them to gently push the Students to get out of their comfort zones. The Students don’t learn anything about car control if they just cruise around – you have to actually push the car to get a feel for what you can do. I don’t know whether that made any difference or not, but the Students progressed dramatically and drove excellently.
Once the exercises completed, the Students broke for lunch while Mark and the Team moved cones to configure them for racing and I got race timing set up. I had some trouble with the timing equipment (I was unable to get it to work at first), but that was fixed when I finally simply rebooted the computer. (Neither Phong nor I understood why that fixed the problem, but it did.) As soon as Mark and the gang had the course in shape, he and I went out for the safety checks in my car, which is the normal procedure after completing the course build at one of our races. We smoothed out a few things (with an eye to safety, of course) and were ready to go.
After the morning exercises, the afternoon racing went very well. The Students got 8 runs each over a period of about 3 hours. I must say, despite the wildly windy conditions, it looked as if everyone had a great time and they must have learned a lot because they were flying. In fact, it was incredibly gratifying for me and the Instructors to see the fabulous progress made by the Students as they worked on the exercises, then translated their skills to the AX course. I can say this without reservation: This group of Students were the best I've ever seen at our AX School. I was talking about this afterwards with a group of Instructors and they were all really wowed by how well the Students drove this year. That's a tribute to the work done by the Students in the exercises and how they applied it to driving on the course, as well as a tribute to the Instructors for doing a great job working with the Students to improve and use their skills. Truly impressive! It was a long day, but well worth it. We finished racing at 5:55 PM and were cleaned up and ready to leave about 6:30 PM.
After the AX School, we had a 5-week hiatus until AX#1 on Saturday May 18th. We had a ton of entries for this event and AX#1 went to the waitlist really early – like 6 weeks before the event. For that reason, I decided to up the registration cap from 65 to 75 and go to three heats. (Venue limitations keep me from going beyond 75.) There are tradeoffs here. More people mean a longer event, of course, but we’re also adding the overhead of another heat changeover, which is not insignificant, thus making for a still longer event. On the plus side, it also means course workers aren’t out there nearly as long, which always makes everyone happy. Anyway, with 75 drivers, there was no question we had to go to three heats – the heats would have been too long with only two. I actually wound up with 102 entries for this race. There were several early cancellations (which is normal), but I had a lot of people on the waitlist.
Then there was the weather forecast… I spent all day every day the week before the race trying to get people off the waitlist to replace cancellations because the forecast for Saturday was rain, rain, rain. It would have been comical if it weren’t so much work with umpty-seven iterations of the driver/assignment roster. Sheesh. Anyway, I really did have 75 confirmed by the Wednesday before the race when I sent out the first iteration of the roster to participants. Little did I know… After a slew of further cancellations and continual Roster rework, I finally finished with 64 confirmed when I went to bed Friday night before the race.
Ah, yes, the weather. When I arrived at PGS at 4:40 AM, it was dry (though I drove through some rain getting there). The rain didn’t start at PGS ‘til about 6:45 and was light to moderate, with a short period of moderately heavy precip. During set up, I had several more cancellations come in via email and a few no-shows, thus our actual count of drivers wound up at 58. That was actually a bit of a problem because I was stuck with 3 heats (there was no way I had time to rework for two heats –that would take hours) and with so few participants, we hardly had enough workers to cover the needed tasks. It wasn’t easy, but we managed, thanks to a few key folks doubling up on work assignments and a couple of volunteers helping out.
Mark’s course for AX#1 was straightforward, fast, and fun – we got very high reviews for it. Interestingly, when Mark and I did the safety runs on the course after the build, we barely changed anything. I think there was maybe one cone placement we changed to smooth out the flow in one spot and that was it. That’s always good news because it means we can open the course early for walking, giving us a chance to get ahead of the schedule.
The only real difficulty we had all day was that the timing display went down in the rain during the first heat. I was really miffed about that after all the work I put into it over the winter to try to keep it working during any rain. My next guess is that the ethernet cable is the problem. It has nicks in it and it’s possible it’s becoming lossy when it gets wet and the signals are no longer latched at the display. I may replace the cable and see if that takes care of the problem. The difficulty here is that it’s only tested when it rains, so who knows when we’ll see it again? Hopefully not soon, if at all this year. ;)
Those who cancelled due to the weather really lost out because the rain tapered off early in the first heat (first car off at 9:25) and actually stopped by the middle of the heat. Second heat had some sprinkles and the third heat had nothing. The course didn’t completely dry out, but it was getting close with some dry spots by the end. I had been examining the portents and it looked to me as if it was going to start raining again during the afternoon, so I kept it to 6 runs. That was tough because we were absolutely flying and under ordinary circumstances could have gotten a bunch of runs. I kept it to 6 to make sure everyone got their runs done under good conditions. It may be hard to believe, but we finished at 1:10 PM, then were packed up and ready to leave about 1:45. A dozen of us went out for a late lunch (per usual) and shortly after we got to the restaurant, the heavens opened upon us. Well… they would have opened upon us if we’d still been outside. Foxed ‘em. ;)
The top 10 placing Porsches for AX#1 were:
1st overall, 1st in Class S5, 47.779 sec: Howard Leikin, 2021 718 Boxster GTS
4th overall, 2nd in Class S5, 49.921 sec: David Critcher, 2016 GT3
5th overall, 1st in Class P3, 50.096 sec: Michael Ricketts, 2005 997
7th overall, 1st in Class S4, 50.440 sec: Greg Hartke, 2014 Cayman S 8th overall, 1st in Class S3, 50.591 sec: Michael Press, 2014 Boxster 9th overall, 2nd in Class S5, 50.814 sec: Ken Wojcik, 2010 911 10th overall, 2nd in Class S4, 51.085 sec: Kevin Keaty, 2014 Cayman S 11th overall, 3rd in Class S5, 51.123 sec: Joel Vengrin, 2023 Cayman GTS
13th overall, 2nd in Class P3, 51.163 sec: Phong Nguyen, 2005 Boxster S 14th overall, 1st in Class I, 51.320 sec: Damon Lowney, 2007 Cayman
In addition, Darrell Pope was 1st in Class P1, Allison Whitehead was 1st in Class P4, Mark Eller was 1st in Class P5, and Collin Wirick was 1st in Class S2. I must say, Mike Ricketts is really killing it in the rain. He did really well at AX#7 in the rain last year with another exceptional finish. Good one, Michael!
I feel as if we really dodged a bullet yet again with the weather for this one – the forecast was far worse than the reality. AX#1 was certainly another highly successful event for us with the drivers really enjoying the course we had for them even if it was a bit damp. That’s actually a priority. We want to have courses that are fun to drive, plenty of runs for the drivers, and finish at a reasonable time so that participants haven’t used up the entire day.
With the completion of AX#1, we were only 2 weeks away from AX#2, which was held on June 1st at Prince George’s Stadium in Bowie. Unlike AX#1, the forecast for AX#2 was as good as it gets with a high temperature in the low to mid 80’s and light winds. It was actually quite chilly when I arrived at the venue to set up, with all of us wearing jackets before the Sun rose and started to warm things up a bit. It did indeed get warm, though, which means good grip was available when you really needed it.
We did have one interesting little problem to resolve when we arrived at PGS. A small dumpster had been left in a position that was along the edge of our racing line. Fortunately, we were able to rectify the situation because Mark had a tow rope, which we affixed to the dumpster, then used his truck to drag the dumpster out of the way. Problem solved, but it could have been otherwise if Mark didn’t happen to have a tow rope with him. Very fortunate! Our racing line doesn’t usually go through the channel that the dumpster was partially blocking, but as fate would have it, this time it did. That could have been worse. ;)
Because Mark’s son Nick was racing in this one, Mark didn’t have to go back to get his car (Nick was bringing it), so he could go out with Phong and John Cho to build the course while Pinto Soin and I took care of setting up all the equipment at the trailer. That was a good thing because this course took a while to build, but even so, Mark came in ready for the safety runs just about the time I was done with the equipment setup. Perfect timing!
This was one of those courses where Mark and I wound up spending a lot of time whipping it into shape when we did the safety runs. We spent a good 45 minutes or so making sure it was safe and flowed well. In the end, all that work really paid off because we got a lot of very positive comments about the course. Howard Leikin said it was “FedEx worthy,” which is indeed a high compliment in local AX-speak. ;)
This was an interesting course to drive. It was very fast, but there were a number of places where you really had to do it right or you were going to lose a lot of time. The section coming up from the lower right of the course map all the way through to the entry to the channels was extremely fast. One driver in a 944 told me he actually used 3rd gear there, which is pretty unusual for AX courses around here. You really had to look ahead as you came over the crest adjacent to worker station 2 so you could hit exactly the right line because if you didn’t, you might have to slow down a bit to negotiate that section, thereby losing time. Heaven help you if you didn’t hit your braking point right, too. In the second run, both Mark and I got a little too exuberant and braked too late. Neither of us could slow down in time for the corner after the channel, so we both just gave up and went around the next gate, which put us off course. Oh, well. ;)
The finish sequence was another example of how you better do it right or you were going to be slow. You could really roll on the throttle for that section that started below worker station 4 (I had the rear end wiggling as I exited the corner to enter that section) and hold it all the way up to the channel, but you really had to stay to the left and hit the braking point just right, then backside the cone for the entry into the finish chicane. If you did that, you could snake through that sequence very fast, but if you didn’t backside that first cone properly, you were totally screwed and could never catch up. Fun!
The top 10 placing Porsches were:
1st overall, 1st in Class S5, 50.458 sec: David Critcher, 2016 GT3
2nd overall, 2nd in Class S5, 52.049 sec: Howard Leikin, 2021 718 Boxster GTS
3rd overall, 1st in Class I, 52.731 sec: Damon Lowney, 2007 Cayman
4th overall, 1st in Class S4, 52.968 sec: Dan Ruddick, 2015 Cayman GTS 6th overall, 1st in Class S3, 53.586 sec: Michael Press, 2014 Boxster 11th overall, 2nd in Class S4, 54.022 sec: Mark Hubley, 2015 Cayman GTS 12th overall, 3rd in Class S4, 54.029 sec: Greg Hartke, 2014 Cayman S 13th overall, 3rd in Class S5, 54.163 sec: Scott Borden, 2010 GT3 Touring 15th overall, 2nd in Class S3, 54.372 sec: John Clay, 2011 Cayman 17th overall, 4th in Class S4, 55.087 sec: Dan Laurent, 2016 Cayman GTS
In addition, Darrell Pope was 1st in Class P1, Phong Nguyen was 1st in Class P3, Greg Whitehead was 1st in Class P4, Mark Miller 1st in Class P5, Luigi Crespo was 1st in Class S1, and Daniel Mattes was 1st in Class S2. Michael Press is off to an impressive start to the season. He’s been flying so far this year and really killing it. He’s a quiet guy, so I’m going to have to start calling him the Silent Assassin. ;)
S4 is always hotly contested and had the most entries (10). I see now that my Co-chair Mark Hubley beat me by 0.007 sec. Scumbag. No respect for his elders. ;) Let’s think about that for a second… 0.007 sec. Hmm. Pinto told me the course was 0.55 miles long and knowing the lap time, we can get an average speed. From there, I find that he beat me by about four-and-a-half inches in the head-tohead. Oh, well. I know where I lost more time than that on my fastest run, anyway. ;) The best part of the day was that Lisa Gritti brought the trailer crew not one, but two tubs of her fabulous chocolate chip cookies! Actually, the second tub of cookies was baked using a different recipe, so we were ordered to make sure we sampled both to determine which we preferred. Tough duty. ;) Thanks, Lisa! We were certainly well taken care of that day!
Don’t forget about our Taste of Autocross program! If you’d like to see what AX is like, show up at one of our races (no registration necessary), pay a nominal $5 fee (mandated by PCA National), and we’ll arrange for you to go out for multiple rides with our Instructors during their competitive laps. This has certainly been a popular exercise for those who have taken advantage of the opportunity. Just look for me or one of the AX Team (Co-chair Mark Hubley, Pinto Soin, Phong Nguyen, John Cho, or Doug Slocum) at the race and we’ll be happy to set you up.
Looking forward to seeing you soon at the races!
