PCA Zone 7 Autocross
Attended my first PCA autocross today at Mather Field outside of Sacramento. This was day 1 of a two-day "Zone" event, day 1 hosted by the Sacramento Valley Region (SVR), day 2 by the Golden Gate Region (GGR). Their web site had no details about the event, so I looked at the GGR autocross info and found that I should show up at 7:30 AM for an all-day set of run/work cycles. So I left at 6AM and drove up to Mather.
Wrong. It turned out that for the Zone nature of the event, you get 1 run session and 1 work session, and the Boxsters, in class T/Ti, meant an afternoon assignment. Well, screw that, I wasn't going to hang around the entire day for 1 run group. I decided to go ahead and run in a morning group, though it meant I was classified as "Exhibition" class, hence no official time. This was kind of annoying.
After being bounced between run groups 1 and 2 a couple of times, they finally told me to run in group 1. I re-gridded my car and got ready to go.
The course was laid out in what they call a "1-plus" format. This means that for each run, you get almost a full practice lap, then a timed lap. From what I can tell, this is not a good way to give people the most runs, but rather is a way to deal with the fact that there is only 1 timing light (frequently flaking out) owned by the club. The layout allows two cars on course at once, with a rate of about one car per 1.5 timed laps. In other words, if a lap is 1 minute, it takes 15 minutes for 10 cars to run (each with a practice start rolling into a timed lap. Compared to the SCCA autocrosses, the whole thing seemed much more informal, slow, and clubby.
The course was a sort of figure-8, with a short curving slalom in the lower right segment, the crossing intersection in the middle, two right hand hairpins forming the upper segment, and a near-full-throttle run back down through the intersection to the start/finish section. I got four runs, all clean: 47.270, 46.038, 46.849, 45.778. Since there were no other Boxsters in my run group, I really had nothing to compare with; but I seemed to be staying pretty close to some of the 911's times. After my run group, I worked the course for group 2, and saw the times drop as some more improved/modified cars hit the course. There was one Boxster that arrived and ran in group 2 with an instructor teaching someone. If I recall correctly his times were just a bit slower than mine.
After group 2 I got ready to go, and just then Doug DeVetter arrived in his Boxster for the afternoon Ti class run group. We talked for a bit and then I hit the road.
I don't know how it turned out. They didn't mail me any results, they were never published in the GGR newsletter, and aren't available on either region's web site. All in all, a somewhat disappointing event.
