AX Course Design

[bryanearll]

What set yesterday's course apart was a seeming endless supply of big sweepers and tight hairpins. As a newbie (all first years are newbies) this course design demanded several things from the 996 and I.

1) You will learn to sustain a powered drift.
2) You will learn to shift into 3rd and back again with some degree of smoothness. (work in progress)
3) You will learn to settle your car.

This course was not a hammer the brakes, hammer the gas course. Two weeks ago that was the theme. There was so much more driver education on Sunday's course.

I think in the 5 or 6 AX's i've participated in there has been a such a varied design that it behooves the club to do some soul searching on what designs functionally teach drivers. Theme one after the Driving School techniques.

Things that might be interesting would be a HUGE off or on camber 180+, an extended rhythm section, an 'open ended' Pitch and Catch (for Greg Phillips), and what not...

My favorite sections of yesterdays course were:
1) The powered exit after the slalom
2) The top of the course, soup to nuts.
3) The right turn up from the swale after the hair pin...

Fun!
b
Bryan

[Tim Comeau]

The downhill grid was really nice to see.......that keeps people from riding their clutches to an uphill starting line.
I would have put the timing lights at a different point. There are basically two req's for the timing lights:
1. They need to be on a straight so drivers don't spin into them. A very interesting point made by someone to possibly explain the inordinate number of times the clocks got screwed up was that because the lights were in a turn, the cones were being knocked through the timing light beam, thus clicking off a lap, then the offending car would follow through, clicking off a second lap time. This jives with the clocks being about 20 seconds too fast almost every time they were off. I'm sure there were a few people who walked through the light beam as well, but I couldn't help noticing that almost everytime, the clocks were 20 seconds off. That's about the gap given off the starting line between cars? I wonder what the minimum time between "good" signals is on our clocks? I think the HOT LAP system rejects any signals that would click off a lap time shorter than 7 seconds?
2. They need to be put back far enough on a straight to give drivers time to decellerate safely after breaking the light beam.
I, too, like to see courses that teach driving. As our entry level driving events, I believe AX's should be half for competition and half for teaching.
After all, we're having a great time, but we're also growing the next crop of instructors, right?
The AX crew did a great job and from the outside looking in, it looked like a well-run event!
It just keeps getting better.

[TheStig]

I liked the fact that I could hang my tail in third and second gear around the long arc toward the end of northern most part of the lot. I think I saw 2 cornerworkers laughing, whoever you all are...