First Autocross of '23 and since completing High Performance Driving School at the Mid Ohio School

It's been a long pause between scraping rubber off of perfectly innocent tires.  In the meantime, I accomplished a teenage dream and more.  I went to racing school!  When I was 14, I decided I had to that.  I didn't have the foresight to realize how cool it would be to do it with one of my kids!  Double Whammy!

Actually, this has been a great year.  I got to go to a Fall Out Boy concert with my other kid in July!

I'm so glad they still tolerate me!

So, what did I learn at racing school?  OK, technically not racing school because they don't teach overtaking, but anyway...

My biggest take away is that I am a "low life, sleazeball, early apexer".  Brian, our instructor assured us that we all are.  You're brain sees a corner and wants to get started.  And this next part shames me.  I knew as a draftsperson and engineer that the best line through a corner is a tangent arc from outside to outside.  This clearly means a constant steering wheel angle to maintain a constant arc.  Somehow my body interpreted this as "you should constantly move the steering wheel throughout the corner".  And this I managed by turning in early and then having to overbrake and oversteer in the back half of the corner.  This fulfilled my strange vision of moving the wheel and, I'm at the traction limit, so I can't go faster, right?

Wrong.  The fastest line is also the one that puts the least stress on the driver and the car.  Once you set that arc, you just have to wait and push the gas pedal enough to almost break the tires loose.  Simple.

Fortunately, they give about 100 laps in the 3 day Mid Ohio School course to practice.  And it is fun practice!  

The school car is a Acura ILX.  Basically a Honda Civic but 201hp and a 6-speed.  I think this a wise choice.  A higher hp car would have distracted from the right line.  And the Acura hit 117mph on the back straight of my fastest lap!  It was an amazing change in driving approach.  I could actually feel the car rotate under trail braking, set up on the arc, apex the turn, and (smoothly and without violence depress the accelerator pedal) and carry on!

Physics is amazing!  

So, let's break it down.  Racing comes down to cornering.  The physics of cornering is very easy to understand on a blackboard (yes, they used a black (OK white) board to great effect at racing school.  The fastest speed around a corner is proportional to the square of the radius of that corner.  So, a larger radius pays big dividends.  That means you start as far outside as possible and finish as far as outside as possible.  This means you are driving a constant radius (that means don't turn the wheel, Hemphill!) around the corner.  It's amazing how peaceful that is on a racetrack at 117mph.  Once you turn the wheel to the correct angle, which means dragging the brakes to plant the front end and bring the rear around, you just monitor the accelerator pedal on the edge of squealing turning to sliding.  That's actually a key skill in racing and skiing.  The instructors mentioned that several times.  Driving is a weight management thing, just like skiing.  It actually felt like skiing after some practice.  Very similar weight shift.

So, how did this pay off at autocross?  Hmmm.  I'm still on the struggle bus.  Actual metrics are hard to come by as it was a test and tune, so the full time table wasn't posted.  But I kept track of the FTD and I didn't do as well as I perceived.  I guess that means I was having so much fun that I didn't keep tabs on the whole field.  In any case, I was 4.6 seconds off the FTD that I saw.  That compares to 4.8 seconds from last season.  Hmmm.  I did that well by recognizing that I was braking and accelerating far to casually.  The skills from Mid Ohio did translate.  And I learned my biggest weakness: my brain does not learn the course quickly enough!  This is actually a key autocross thing.  In a track race, you get practice and qualifying.  You can try different lines, braking points, apexes, etc.  In the autocross, you get a course walk and 6 runs.  This is not well suited to my brain.  Fortunately, I was at a test and tune where we got 26 runs!  My last was fastest because my brain had caught up.  

I also noticed that I was not very aggressive on the brakes or the throttle for most of my runs.  That led to my fastest run.  The tires can brake or accelerate but one has to embrace both of those very thoroughly!

In any case, another week of #funwithcars !