SCCA Autocross School, 3Com Park

Although I did a lot of autocrosses last year, I've never really had any instruction about it. So when I saw the posting for the SCCA Autocross School, I signed up right away because I knew it would fill up fast.

The school was held at Candlestick (3Com) Park in San Francisco. Each student had an instructor assigned for the whole day. The class was split into 3 groups. Each group did a series of exercises in a different part of the parking lot. The exercises were variations of a basic large rectangular lap, including slaloms, different radiuses, and different braking situations. It was pretty good, although there were enough students that one didn't get enough "track time" to really be able to repeatedly test the car's behavior in a given test, or to test the driver's handling of those situations. At the end of the day a big autocross course was laid out and we got a couple of runs on it.

My instructor was Katie Kelley, an SCCA National Champion and excellent Miata driver. If there's one thing I took away from her instructions, it was to look farther ahead. I know that I need to look far ahead on the track, but it never really occurred to me to look far ahead in an autocross. When I really got a chance to try this during the runs on the autocross course, I was amazed at how much it helped. I had figured that there was so much close-up action with maneuvering and cone navigation, that if I looked ahead I'd run over the nearby cones. But in fact, looking ahead amongst the sea of cones doesn't at all make you forget about the nearby cones. It instead relegates each of them to a sort of subconscious obstacle that you naturally avoid, while your focus becomes the cones a corner or two beyond, and how to get there on a good line. It really works.