Close to home - for one of us

On April 20th, we decide to run the Camarillo autocross hosted by the PCA Santa Barbara region instead of hanging out at the Long Beach GP. I love running this location because it's close to home. Unfortunately, it is a 1.5 hour drive for Jason to get here.

This event is held at the end of an active runway and we get to see planes flying over our head, coming in to land as we are racing. Kind of neat.

This PCA region usually puts on courses that are lined with lots of cones and on the narrower side with not much choice of line - there isn't much room to begin with since the course is on a rather narrow runway. We decided that this course was going to be a tight one as we walked the course.

With the arrangement of our run groups, Jason and I were split into different groups and I was driving first. After my first run, I figured out just how tight it was. Our steering wasn't fast enough and I had to cross over with my hands in order to make the turns and then immediately turn the other way in sections. On the next run, I was yelling out the window to Jason who was working on course about how tight the course was. I tried not changing my hand position and it just wasn't enough to make the car turn tightly enough so after talking with Jason, I ended up taking my gloves off to give me better grip on the wheel to turn quickly. Ouch.



It was fun in a different way. There were several regular PCA SB event folks there and they remembered us. They gave us lots of room before we started so that we wouldn't catch the vehicle in front.

In many respects, this course reminded me of the more typical East Coast course on a small postage stamp sized lot and driving the line was critical to a good time - hm, where do I remember that from? Oh yeah, just the week before. Of course, what do I do? I don't drive the line in one of the key turns - again. Jason is running faster than I am again and I'm scratching my head wondering what I'm doing wrong. The video tells the truth - it's the line again. Grrr!



The timed runs don't usually tell us in a timely fashion whether or not we hit cones during the run, so we depend on what others might say or what we think we did. Deciding on how hard to attack the course becomes guesswork too. Then there is also the risk of cones showing up on what we believe to be good runs.

At the Santa Barbara events, all non-Porsches are put into one class, so we are racing against Corvettes and S2000's that are on race tires. We have fun talking trash with the Vette drivers about beating them straight up.

At the end of the day, based on raw time, Jason is ahead of me by 4/10. We leave the event believing that this is the finishing order. However, when the results are published, there is a cone on Jason's fast run and no cone on mine. There is no good way to know how accurate the cone reports are :( In the end, both of us finish in the top 10 based on raw time. Still a good day.