1999 SCCA Solo 2 (autocross) Round 15
Rookie Stock 1 Championship Points for 1999
The season is heading down the home stretch. Including today there are four more rounds, and I'm in 2nd place in Rookie Stock 1, trailing the leader Damien Teitelbaum by 120 points. Going into today's round it's a tight race for the top four spots, with Stuart Teitelbaum trailing me by 110 and Kevin Lahey back another 38 from there. Due to the way the "drops" work in the scoring (you discard your worst 5 scores, including no-show days where your score is zero), it looks to me like we all "control our own destiny" as they say in the sports standings. That is, if you win the remaining events, you win the season.
As with the previous round, the course was very short due to the small size of the parking lot. The best time of the day was 33 seconds.
I got to walk the course after registration, but on my first run I didn't have a good sense of how tight the corners were, and I found myself either going too fast or being too cautious. I wacked a cone in the first slalom section when I totally steered wrong as I went by it. And then as I approached the finish -- which was yet another curving finish requiring an immediate deceleration afterwards -- I had too much speed, had to brake, and spun, taking out another cone. My time seemed good at 41.787 but with the two downed cone penalties was 45.787. The other top four first run times in my class were clean runs in the 43's.
My second and third runs felt better and were clean. At the finish I took it a little slower and avoided braking until the cones straightened. Slight improvements to 41.430 and 41.423. Damien was maintaining 2nd place with a 42.663.
I don't know what I did differently, but on my fourth run I managed to shave almost another full second off my time. I must have just been getting a better feel for the course, and through the finish corner I kept the speed up pretty well and managed to brake in time to avoid the run-out cones. It was a 40.524, enough for the win by nearly two seconds overall, for my 3rd win of the season.
This pulls me to within 80 points of Damien with three rounds to go. It will be very difficult to make up that difference in the remaining three rounds, but it's not impossible.
