Just like last time out, we'll do a quick recap of a smaller event before moving on to the main course. So we'll start with the second NCCBMWCCA autocross of the year, held Saturday at Waldorf Blue Crabs Stadium.

This was the first time NCC ran at Waldorf, and they scaled up their course philosophy nicely compared to the usual tight courses they put together on Bowie Baysox Stadium's significantly smaller lot. They took good advantage of Waldorf's expansive pavement with a fast course. We brought two cars: I had Kate's Mazdaspeed MX5 while she had Captain Slow for the first time.

Things started out well, with the only real downside was my running out of RPMs in the MSM and spending some serious time in two sections of the course on the rev limiter. These stretches weren't long enough to require shifting to third, but I'm sure there was time lost as I basically ran out of steam some distance before having to slow for a corner.

I made four clean runs and improved each time out to a fast last lap of 43.921 seconds. At the end of the day, I thought that would have been good enough for second out of five entrants in the X3 class, but after the fact, some people who had entered in X4 realized they were classed incorrectly, and moved into X3, and of course they were faster.

Kate only got one clean run in as she wiped out some cones and went off-course once as she overcooked a corner and couldn't get back on track in time. Her best clean run was 47.579 seconds, and she wound up somewhere around tenth out of fifteen in X4.

BMWCCA next runs at Summit Point's skidpad next month, and I don't think I'll be partaking. That track is a pretty good haul from home, and odds are the work schedule won't cooperate with NCC's. But we've done fairly well chasing X3 points in their first two events, so we're not completely ruling it out.

We move on to the next day's festivities having strung together two consecutive good races in a row, one right after the other, back to back. I can't remember this happening before, and it felt good. But we couldn't luck out extending that streak any longer.

Running with the Washington DC Region of SCCA is about as close to super-serious autocrossing as we're going to get. This means big fields, super-prepped cars, and serious drivers. It's probably being overly optimistic to think that we can run much out of the cellar with these guys, but they run at FedEx Field and those nice big courses are hard to turn away from.

The only problem with the aforementioned Field's lot was that half of it was resealed sometime between last week and this week, and in the cool weather, grip was at a premium. Watching early run groups having car after car spin and slide, we knew we were going to have a tough go of it.

Walking the course three times, I thought I knew where to go. That was my first mistake. Then, while the heat before mine was running, instead of chasing cones watching drivers tackling the course, I was assigned to work the grid. This is a cushy assignment, so I'm not complaining, but time away from the course is not necessarily a good thing.

So it was then time to go, and I strapped myself into the '99 to take on the 14 other cars entered in the STR class. I got my game face on and made my first run.

The course was fast and fun from behind the wheel, just like I figured it would be when we were walking it. I thought the '99, on new Bridgestone Potenza RE-11s and now with the rear sway bar disconnected, handled it well as its slaloming was drastically improved over last week's effort. That first run was so good that the dude who hands over a post-it note with your time said "nice run".

The second run was even better. I only had one real tough spot where I approached a turn and couldn't remember if I had to go left or right till I was right on top of it. I was smart enough to not charge in so hard that I'd be unable to make it through, and I finished that second run with both a little time improvement and a lot of confidence that I could pick up even more next time out now that I knew to approach that mystery turn knowing that it was a near 90-degree left.

As I was driving to the start for my third run, I saw the time turned in by the No. 14 STR car, and he came in with a mid-54 second run. I glanced at my second run Post-it and saw I was already down into the 54s and was pretty pumped. My under-sprung, under-tired, under-powered underdog Miata was running neck and neck with one of the better cars in the class. And knowing one spot where I could pick up time, well, I was feeling pretty good about how my day was going.

I ran that third run and did pretty well, but I thought I heard the words "off course" on the P.A. as I came out of the stop box. That was confirmed when the post-it had my time and "DNF" written on it.

I was perplexed. Some of my friends stopped me and asked if I knew where I screwed up and I couldn't say, especially when I swore I ran the same course as I did on my previous two runs. That's when they said that I had been called off-course on all three runs so far.

This ticked me off a little. There's nothing wrong with not running the course right, but geez, at least tell the guy before he's done it three times and ruined his day. But there wasn't much else to do but figure out how to do it right and see if I could at least get one clean run in just so I didn't look like a complete idiot when the results were published.

I watched some other drivers make their runs and I figured my mistake out. About a third of the way in, the course hooks around a cone in a sharp left-hander that led to a Chicago box in the middle of the lot. From there you're supposed to hook left downhill to a right-hander that emptied into an uphill slalom. I had been exiting the Chicago box heading right up the hill, skipping the right-hander and entering the slalom basically halfway through.

With this knowledge tucked in my head, I puttered up to the start bound and determined to take no prisoners on this last run. I started out like gangbusters, slamming through the opening slalom, around the showcase left-hander, and then it was up the hill, around the left-hander, and headed into the Chicago box. I made sure I was pointed downhill and got through the right-hander for the first time, but as I got out of that and headed for the uphill slalom, my aggression got the better of me and the the car quickly snapped around, spinning at least 540 degrees, probably more.

I got going again and ran the last half of the course at 80%, and despite that I also picked up a cone in the final slalom. That last run was a 66.XXX, and I wound up dead last in STR by six seconds or so. I'd like to think that the spin cost me more than six seconds, so in my mind I wouldn't have been last in class if I kept the car pointed in the right direction.

We get a weekend off before racing again, which stinks since I really don't need to have my most recent outing being a certified stinker rattling around in my head for a couple weeks. But we'll have to take some action to make sure we don't have another fiasco the next time out. I don't really want to be one of those goobers who draws himself a map of the course while walking it, but I think I'd rather being a map-drawing goober than a multiple-DNF'er. If there's any time gap between the course walk and when my heat makes its runs, having something to study while sitting in the car might prevent a repeat of SCCA event #1.

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