Autocross tips/technique

Welcome to cone killing! What car will you be using and is it modified?

 

Good advice. One thing that really helps me after walking the course a couple of times is to close my eyes and visualize the whole course in as much detail as possible. If I can visually get through the course in my mind, I find I have little trouble remembering where to go when it's time and I can worry more about going faster.

Also, watch your tire pressures as they will increase every run on a warm day and can affect the handling. I shoot for 32psi rear and 37 psi front and try to keep them there, but it will depend on you tires and car. Just ise the recommendations on the door jamb and keep them consistent from run to run to start so the car's handling isn't a moving target. If the handling is off, you can tweak the pressures to get it in line. I was surprised how sensitive my car is as 2 psi one way or the other makes a difference.

 

Clutch wise, most autocross events aim at being set up so you get to 2nd gear, and then stay there. All things being equal, try that on your first run, and plant your left foot on the dead pedal and plant both hands on the wheel, and if the course is set up this way then you don't have to think about the left foot or shifting after the start.

At your first event, ask if they have a Novice class, which should allow you to both ride with an experienced driver, and have an experienced driver ride with you. Take advantage of these two opportunities and you will increase your learning a huge amount.

 

Mostly good advice except for the "smooth" part. When I first started dong autocross I read all books and talked to the club experts and national champions. I talked to a lot of club road racers too. The word "smooth" came up many many times, so I gave that plenty of attention.

I wasn't bad but I wasn't fast. I wanted to win. In frustration I asked a regional champ to take me for a ride around the course. I was astonished! There was nothing smooth about the way she drove. It was completely frantic. She was moving the steering wheel three times faster than I was. She was also very aggressive with the brakes and throttle. It looked all herkey-jerkey and frankly kind of rough. But she was fast; way faster than I. And, of course, that's how you get to be a national champion.

I gave this a lot of thought and finally realized that the key to going fast is not smoothness, but precision. For example, on a typical very tight autocross course, there are few sweeping turns. When you reach the turn in point, you need to turn in NOW. But, and here's the key, you need to rapidly move the steering wheel to EXACTLY the right point. If you have to take some steering out or put more in, you've failed and you'll be slow. If you ease the steering wheel over, you will be slow.

The same with brakes and throttle. Usually there's nothing smooth about the transition from full throttle to maximum braking when you approach a turn. It's quite violent actually. But, you need to put on EXACTLY the correct amount of brake in an instant. Too much and you lock up, too little and you waste time feeding in more brake; i.e. you're slow. There are some instances where you should let the car coast for a few seconds under part throttle, but these are rare. Usually, the typical course requires a high percentage of full throttle and maximum braking. Of course, the more power your car has, the more throttle feathering you'll do. By the way, most autocross competitors use left foot braking.

When you finish a 30 second run, you should be out of breath.

There's not much to say about using the clutch except to be aggressive at the start. My wife was an SCCA regional champion. At one competition she was driving my car for the first time and asked a friend if her starts looked OK. He said, "Use a little more throttle and let the clutch out quicker just so the front tires squeal a little bit". She said, you mean make the rear tires squeal, don't you? He said, "No, this is a front wheel drive car". She said, "Really?"

We all had a good laugh. What does it mean if you can become a regional champion without knowing which end of the car gets the power?

Anyway, have fun. Ask others how they do it. Ask for tips about tire pressure.

 

smooth hands do not equal slow hands. Objective is to not jerk the car outside the friction circle or work against suspension travel. That is why stiff springs and shocks can be a help. You can have fast hands because the suspension also moves fast.

 

Mozella has it right, one of the most common mistakes newbies make is to put in too much steering lock and jerk the car on corner entry. Then they have too much steering lock in and have to unsteer a bit to keep the car on line. Again, this is very common since what they are really trying to do is pitch the car into the corner and get it to take a set early. That is very confidence inspiring, but as noted, it's slow.

When I teach the sport suggest that even before you go to an event you do some learning on the street to teach muscle memory and proper turn in. As Mozella noted, turning the wheel smoothly on corner entry the right amount (not too much or too little) is a key driving technique that you need to learn before you can be fast.

What I suggest is that you practice on the street, every time you drive for a while and the proper technique will become natural and then you won't think about it at all.

What you want to do is look ahead at the corner and decide how much lock it will take to turn through that corner at the speed you are traveling, and then put in that much lock as you enter the corner. Then hold that amount of lock and learn where the car goes. Obviously when you are learning the technique you will end up changing the amount of lock that you put in during your turn, somewhere in mid corner, but after a while you will find that you can learn to put in the correct amount of steering lock and the car will go smoothly around the corner with virtually no correction to your line until you unwind it at corner exit.

What this will do is teach muscle memory and link the computer in your head with the road ahead. This is key in that once you have learned this, your steering input during turn in will become much smoother and more precise, and you will find that you aren't adding too much lock on turn-in and aren't "sawing" at the wheel in mid corner.

It will also make you a better road driver in that you will be smoother and more precise on the street.

After a while this becomes second nature and you don't think about it anymore, you just do it correctly all the time.

 

Forgot to mention that in learning the above technique that it's also important to keep your hands at the same position (3 and 9 preferably) so that you learn to turn the same amount from the same position. The purpose of all of this is to improve your muscle memory and turning from the same starting point is important.

I certainly don't want to get into a big discussion about "shuffle steering" but you can take from the above that I'm not a big fan of that particular technique, although there are plenty of folks who do it successfully. IMHO and qualified as such, shuffle steering is necessary on cars with really slow steering on really tight courses, and that has pretty much gone away because cars have gotten faster steering in the last 20 years and courses tend to be faster and not so tight anymore. If you shuffle steer (displace your hands before corner entry), you never really know where your wheels are pointed and that makes it a lot more difficult to catch the car correctly if it breaks loose, and it makes every turn in maneuver different, which you don't want.

With autocross you need every advantage you can get because every thousandths of a second counts, and every thing you give up as far as sensory input, puts you at a disadvantage.

 

Rant time:
If you have a child or a grand child just learning how to drive, make them participate in an SCCA autocross event as a condition for using a car without adult supervision. If you make them go to 3 or 4 events, you may save their life. Here's why.

Most kids, especially boys, learn to drive at the limit in Mom's car when nobody is looking. You don't want your child to experience his/her first skid late at night, especially if they're also experimenting with alcohol. Daughters aren't immune because they sometimes let their pimply faced boyfriend drive your car even if you don't like to think about it. The results can be tragic.

If they learn car control at and beyond the limits of grip on an autocross course, they may decide getting their kicks an an autocross event is fun and eliminate or at least reduce their urge to act a fool on the highway. Or, at the very least, when they act foolish they will at least know something about car control. And if your pretty daughter does have a goofy boyfriend, make him go too as a condition of dating your daughter.

Learning parallel parking in Drivers Education in High School does little good when the back end starts to break loose some night.

By the way, take some kind of econo-box or other family car, not your Ferrari.

 

For the kids who have an interest in it, Auto X is a fun & great idea. I instruct at our local Tire Rack Street Survival clinics and that's one of the best things a parent can do for their kids without a competitive atmosphere. Even in just the single day of what we teach, skills taught that can save them and others.

 

Don't be afraid to hit some cones. I auto crossed for two years and I didn't hit a cone for the first 1.5 years of that. Even though I competed well, that shows that I wasn't pushing things enough.

GT

 

I highly recommend the "Street Survival" course for kids if for no other reason it teaches them to use the car to its limits in braking and cornering. Most drivers Ed courses are woefully inadequate at teaching young drivers what they can and can't do. I took my son to a "Street Survival" course when he was 16 and then followed that up with a couple of autocross test sessions where we could get a lot more time on course than a typical 4 or 5 runs in a normal autocross and he progressed much more than I thought he would.

He hasn't so much as scratched a car in his 8 years behind the wheel.

 

Have you done an SCCA Solo II Level 1 school? If not, they are very good.

I would do both the Level 1 and 2 then get some seat time before laboring over techniques.

Also, are you out for fun or to win?

If winning is important, I would try every technique and driving style out there until you find the one that lowers the numbers on the clock. I wouldn't pay attention or do anything that doesn't make you faster.

Good luck!
LS

 

If you're out to win, the very first thing you have to do is get the best tires for your class. You'll either have to get lucky or be very very good to win if you don't have the best tires. That's just how it works. I went from somewhere in the top third to the top 5 or 6 and winning my class just by putting on better tires. If I were to shell out for the best tires, I'd be in the hunt for ftd and pax overall, but I use autox more for fun and learning the car/tires than to go all out for the win, so it's not worth the $1300 it'd cost to do so. I can tell you the cars that consistently are fastest do, though. Here's my run over the weekend, I finished 6th out of 63 cars and was the fastest car not trailered to the event, won my class by 1.1s and really started to get a feel for the tires.


http://www.ferrarichat.com/forum/143244008-post15.html

 

The Tire Rack SCCA Starting Line school is a partnership between the Sports Car Club of America and Tire Rack to give automotive enthusiasts a professional, all-inclusive entry into the world of performance driving.

 

...and the same shocks, brake pads, alignment, chassis setup, etc. as the fast guys.

This would be another thread altogether for sure. Your equipment needs to be setup similar to the top drivers to get into the strike window to win.

Are you in shape? Could you lose some weight?

Spend as much seat time around the class that you're in and do what the top guys do.

As far as driving style and technique goes, you will come up with the one that suits you. It may be that you are faster driving with one hand on the wheel and two feet on the pedals.

Then again, if you are just out to have fun, then focus on that.

If you want to win, we can peel this onion until the sun sets!

LS

 

It all starts with the tires. You can get close with just the right tires, but not with all of the other stuff without the right tires. To win, you need to dial the car (and yourself) in to the tires, but without the tires you can tune and setup to your heart's content and not even be close. SCCA has made a shift back to street tires in their stock classes, which I'm a huge fan of as previously you had no hope in any class unless you just ran Hoosier A6's. Now the competition is more of a real stock arrive and drive type competition instead of having to bring competition tires. My class is still a DOT-R class (street prepared), so no help to me, but the vast majority of cars can now show up on real street tires and compete. I was able to beat a couple of cars on A6's and win my class (I was on R6's), but they were not very well driven. There's one guy in my class where if he shows up, I'm 2nd. No way I can compete with R6's vs. his A6's in a well set up and driven car. It's not even close. If I put sticker A6's on, I'd be closer but it would take a lot of work to consistently beat him, both for me and the car. That or rain, I crushed the class last time it rained (but I have the right tires for that).

 

There should be a time adjustment for the difference in tread ratings.

 

They do to compare classes, but you have to run the best tires for your class as they don't adjust car by car. If your class is street tire, you have to run the 200 tread wear tires, if your class allows dot r's, you run Hoosier a6's. That's if your goal is to be competitive, otherwise run what you reasonably can and have fun.

 

Bob, why don't you just get a set of A6s?

That way you will know how far off you really are?

LS

 

Maybe when the R6's wear out. Not really worth dropping $1300 at this point and I was the fastest car on DOT's last time out anyway and my goal is more to have fun than to try to set the overall fastest time.

 

JB Racing carries A6s with low heat cycles and a lot of life remaining. You could get them for $80-100 a corner.

LS