[Autocross] Novice School + Points Event #2 with TSCC: April 2024

Helping others go faster in the dry, and competing in the wet

Sorry for the lame pictures… taking photos is usually not on my mind when at events.

Saturday: Autocross Novice School/Fun Runs

The Tidewater Sports Car Club held a novice school at the Suffolk Executive Airport and the weather couldn’t have been better. It was warm enough and slightly overcast most of the day so was great for getting some right-seat time helping novices learn the basics to go faster. I had two great students who were polar opposites as far as experience and how their first runs went:

One in an Elantra N who had several autocross events under his belt and was honestly reasonably quick to begin with - just needed to smooth out his inputs and get him looking a bit further ahead
Another in a Golf TSI. She had never done autocross at all, just thought it might be fun to try and wanted to start with a novice school

In a nut shell, the Elantra N driver progressed really quickly. He had the right amount of aggression behind the wheel and we were able to tame it to the point where he was running some of the faster times of the day. He ended roughly 0.5 sec off of the top novice time of the day with a 27.xxx time if my memory is right. (Times were not recorded, just a display up).

The driver of the Golf required a little more coaxing to get her confidence up behind the wheel. For a point of reference we started the day out with a 56ish second run, and ended up with her in the 34s. We got a ton of runs in and made progress little by little, dropping maybe 0.5 to 1 second at a time. I’ve found that with more timid students, it’s extra important to not overwhelm them with all the places they can improve (because the truth is it’s basically everywhere).

The three things we had to work on most were:

Looking ahead
Judging the distance to cones on the passenger side of the car (we ate a LOT of slalom cones on the RH side)
Just going faster in general in some of the faster sweeping corners

The first two points were actually not too hard to reign in under control… but the lowest hanging fruit for her was a ton of easy speed to gain in a long sweeping LH turn almost immediately after the start, so it involved a bunch of hyping her up to get into the throttle and maintain it. We slowly got to the point of giving it “throttle” but I told her we needed “THROTTLE” with all uppercase letters… and once we got there.. we needed to add an exclamation point to the end. 😂 Once she trusted the grip and stayed in the throttle in that spot, this naturally translated into a bit more speed throughout the rest of the course. She had a great time and made huge improvements dropping over 20 seconds off of her first runs of the day. This was probably one of my more rewarding instructing experiences.

And of course the instructors got to take some fun runs towards the end of the day in their own cars. Since Points Event #1, I made 2 very minor changes:

I trimmed a bit more off of the tops of the front bump stops, plus the rear bump stops as well. This helped immensely over the small washboard surfaces and was a big help in being able to put power down as well as a wrong wheel drive car can be expected to.
Swapped my RE71RS from the Apex 17x9 wheels over to the Konig 17x9 Hypergrams.

*Setup notes for the weekend - bold = adjusted from last event*

So how did it do? It felt really damn good. Had no issues with bumps and roughness so trimming the bump stops helped there for sure. The Suffolk site is a thousand times bumpier than Virginia Motorsports Park so this was a really good test to make sure it was a move in the right direction. I actually have some more bump stops on the way to experiment with further, but I think somewhere between the original trimming and what was trimmed here will be a good balance for handling and still controlling hard bottoming on large highway speed bumps. It’s definitely not “bad” now, but it could be a tad bit better. It means nothing not knowing other peoples’ results but my fastest time was a 25.8xx.

One other change that was made is I bought some monster sized magnets from www.autocrossdigits.com. Partially to save time when setting up in the morning, and partially to have less surface area for cleaning cone scuffs off the side of the car. They’re dumb easy to keep clean with no pointed edges that will be likely to peel up and come off the car.

Sunday: Autocross Points Event #2 in the Rain

Sunday was unfortunately plagued with low 50s temps, wind and rain, timing problems, and silly things like the timing bus generator deciding to fail at an inopportune time. Due to all the issues going on, my co-driver (who helps run the events) did not end up taking any runs unfortunately.

I was constantly checking the forecast the night prior and was debating whether to run the Conti ECS02 (which are amazing in rain) or keep the RE71RS on the car. I ultimately decided to keep the Bridgestones on, and also softened the front sway bar. Why would I want to make the car “oversteer more” with softening the front bar? Well, simply put: in the rain the car just isn’t going to generate as much lateral grip. If the body isn’t leaning over as far… then you don’t need the car to be nearly as stiff in roll to maintain a decent contact patch. Basically any time you reduce grip at all 4 corners (less-sticky tires, or rain in this case)… it will cause the car to move more towards understeer… generally speaking. This was my attempt to see if this was the right call… and I suspect it was (more on this later).

First run out the gate I managed a 42.845… which looking at the final results of the entire event was the fastest first-run of anybody. This is something I definitely haven’t accomplished before. My second run was shortly after and with a tiny bit of heat in the tires I was just really “in the zone” and concentrated, managing to put down a 40.881 which ended as my fastest time. I felt like this was a pretty solid time overall and figured the only way I’d get much better is really just throwing the car around and seeing if it would stick. Run 3 I got overzealous at the end of the first slalom and straight lined the last cone trying to carry too much speed so called the run off at that point (44.497+1). And my final run I tagged a cone towards the end of the course, but rainfall had also been steadily increasing as the heat went on and was still slower even without the cone (41.420+1).

One of my goals this year is being able to go out and just put down a good time early on… so hopefully I can do this again at the next event.

My fastest run of the day

Was changing the bar setting the right call?

I think setting the front sway bar on soft was likely the right move… though because it wasn’t tested back to back it’s more of a seat-of-the-pants guess. I don’t have any good rain autocross data to compare to.

Since I changed the ride height, added a ton of camber, and roll center correction over the winter… this also means I probably need to revisit the front swaybar soft/stiff settings even in the dry. With the car sitting lower now… perhaps it’s fully on the bump stops regardless of how stiff the front sway bar is and now might benefit from softening the front bar? There’s also a lot more camber now which will factor in as well. Test for another day.

And the PCV Testing…

I’m on the MK8 full retrofit, with BMS catch can inline with the can connected back to the turbo inlet like “normal”. I ended up getting a tiny bit of oil over 8 runs in the dry on Saturday. I didn’t get anything really worth mentioning over Sunday’s 4 runs in the wet. In the ~1000 street miles I’ve run in this configuration, I’ve never had any oil in the can under “normal” driving conditions, even with some pulls and general shenanigans.