Cheney Stadium Weekend Summary

STI rounding the hairpinWell, I didn’t trophy on Sunday, but I came agonizingly close. I got nudged out on the last run by the person who was in 5th. The worst part of it was that I just messed up a little bit at the finish pushing wide just enough to cost me the faster time I’m pretty sure I had that run. So, I finished 5th out of 12 on Sunday and 3rd of 7 with a Trophy on Saturday. Overall, a good weekend with mixed weather.

My First Trophy*

Today I placed 3rd in ST2 (indexed street tire class for WWSCC events) out of 7 competitors, which qualifies me for a trophy! Hooray. The event was at Cheney Stadium. It went well and no one got shot in the face. I don’t know if I’m getting better or the fact that the pavement at Cheney is not very grippy. But it seemed that the AWD cars might have had an advantage over the FWD or RWD cars. I was getting sideways a lot, but I kept it tidy on my 5th run to pull out a mid-37 second run.

My trophy was a mini RC car. It’s a 2006 Dodge Charger ROLLIN’ PHAT ON SUM DUBZ, YO! w00t.

There’s another event tomorrow at the same place. We’ll see how that goes.

* Technically I trophied when I was a novice, but that doesn’t really count (even though I beat like 45 people)

WWSCC Sports Car Spectacular

The Sports Car Spectacular is the final WWSCC event of the season and it marks the end of my very first autocross season. I definitely improved over the course of the season. The WWSCC organization is a great one and put on some very fun events.

My season began on a high note, winning my first event in the novice afternoon class out of a very large pool of opponents (28 total). It also ended very well this weekend with me doing very well and coming very close to trophying in ST2.

I was hoping to do well enough to move past Mike Perkowitz in the ST2 season standings and finish the season in 5th, but I had really bad showing at the Enduro event earlier this season and I wasn’t able to over come it, despite beating Mike by almost 4 points this event. I also ran the first 2 events in novice, which gave me a smaller pool of scores to choose my good events from. Big props to Mike for keeping consistent throughout the season.

Finally, I’d like to note that my most recent upgrades appear to have moved me closer to the Spore couple, which means they are working (those mods being the camber plates + alignment and Cobb Anti-sway bars). I’m confident with another day or two of autocross and I’ll have new oversteer figured out enough to not spin (see my 3rd run of the SCS event).

WWSCC Miatacross 07

Here is the video from my latest Autocross. I placed fifth in ST2, middle of the pack. That isn’t bad considering how underprepped my car is for XSM but the ST3 guys with their coilover setups and a lot more driving experience are still a lot quicker than I am.

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WWSCC Enduro XXIX

I’m getting more consistent with the car and starting recognize the weaknesses in it. I did pretty terrible for the first session (which in this case was the scored session) but didn’t do so bad for the 2nd half of the day running in the TO (time only) group. The results page was reported incorrectly so both my times show up under ST2, which is fine but just know that the bottom time that has a TOPM index was my 2nd half of the day run and was much better than the first. It’s also the run in the video below.

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