Autocross Recap: Capital Driving Club Test & Tune at Harry Grove Stadium, November 2 2009

Seat Time Makes For A Good Time

At first glance, a test & tune day at the end of the season doesn't seem to make sense. For most people, they've been adding parts and fiddling with setups on their autocross cars over the winter, and they could use a non-points-paying event in the spring to make sure the installs went well while also knocking the rust off the driving part of the equation. A TnT at the end of the year seemed anti-climactic since we'd already done a whole season with what we've got, and our mad driving skillz were about as good as they were going to get by now.

But it turns out that Capital Driving Club's end-of-season Test & Tune came at a very good time for both drivers of Parsimonious Racing.

Kate, who only got to partake in about half of the events that I did, really needed seat time behind the wheel of her Ugly Duckling. The promise of ten runs during the course of the day would certainly get that job done. I had just put new coilover suspension in Captain Slow and wanted one shot at seeing how it would run before heading into the off-season, especially if something was not right with the install and that something wouldn't show up in regular old around-town driving.

The course was the same one that CDC ran the day before as their points-paying season finale. Ideally we would have liked to have run that as well, but my Saturday night work assignment meant that it would be pretty much impossible to run Saturday in Frederick, Maryland, then head back to Waldorf to work, then leave Waldorf to head back to Frederick. Sure, it could be done even though there's ninety minutes of driving between the two destinations, except nowhere in the equation was sleep factored in.

As it turns out, sleep wasn't really in the cards much at all since we had company Saturday afternoon and I only squeezed in a three-hour nap before work Saturday night. But the car was loaded and I left straight from work to Harry Grove Stadium, where Kate met me and we got ready to run. There were two heats and we were in different ones, so I got to run and work first, then her, and we repeated that for the afternoon runs.

The lot at Harry Grove is not large, but the CDC designers put together a fun course that took advantage of what real estate they had by criss-crossing the course a couple times over itself on its way to a 40-something second run. When we started walking it we figured there was no way we'd be able to remember where to go coming out of certain corners since the possibilities were numerous and any of the options looked like it could be the right one. But there was only one off-course between the two of us during the course of the day, so we must have done a good job memorizing the track.

Captain Slow was impressive for the first time out. The suspension did its job without drama, clunks, rubs, or any other surprises. The grip was amazing, even on the daily driver Azenis, and as it turned out I could push the car a lot further than I was prepared to. There were times where I did cross the line, and there are a couple "+1" notes on the scorecard showing that I whacked a cone or two, but if you're not getting in trouble, how do you know when you're getting close to the limit?

The fast guys were running sub-40 second laps and that was what I was shooting for, and in the final run of the day I got that by the skin of my teeth with a 39.99 run.

Kate got some questionably useful coaching in the afternoon sessions, with my encouraging her to "gas gas gas gas gas gas" with the foot on the floor quite a bit more than I think she was originally willing to go. But her car has good brakes and I think it's important to know what will happen if you head into a turn with too much steam so, when (not if) it happens again, it's not unexpected and the damage to the lap time can be kept to a minimum. She took Slow out for a couple runs and then went back to her own car, and I tried hers as well. The Duckling lacks grip where my car hangs on, but I think it's a relatively easy/cheap fix (tires) rather than something more elaborate (springs/shocks). It can benefit from a beefier front sway but there's no huge pressing need to yoink the stock shocks as they still work pretty well for a sixteen year-old car.

By the end of the day, we were pooped. Complicating things was that I was expected back at work on Sunday night so I got a headstart on the ride home to sneak in a quick nap. Ten runs in a day is a lot of hard driving, 40 seconds or so at a time, and I think we both got quite a bit out of it. Now all we have to do is wait until the 2010 season begins, many months down the road.

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