It's a "Focus course"

Wow, time sure flies. It's already been two weeks since our last SCCA event. Bob Jardine was the course designer. Before the event, we heard grumbling about seeing a "Focus" friendly course. I'm not sure what that was supposed to mean, but I was afraid that it would be a very tight, tough on the car, 1st gear in multiple places type of course.


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I didn't have to worry. It turned out to be the toughest course that we've seen here in Fontana since I first started autocrossing here in 2006. This course had a combination of slower turns and some faster, off camber pucker up turns. This definitely wasn't the typical Fontana event where you were going as fast as you could through big sweepers and see who could carry more speed. Bob's course emphasized the accurate placement of the car and keeping the line. The line was so important that it you consistently were off the line by a few feet, you would go slower.


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Jason and I went out and we put in good runs, both in the 59 second range. None of our competitors managed to get into the 59's. After having seen it once, both of us thought that we would start going faster during the following runs. However, to our surprise, both of us started going slower. We were checking the car, scratching our heads and wondering what was wrong. Was it us (couldn't be, both of us were going slower and some of our competitors) or the car? We heard a comment that the temperature had changed some 20 degrees during our run - was that the reason we went slower?


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After I watched my video, I feel that it was just lousy driving (at least on my part). On the camera side, I managed to hit only one of the apexes that I was aiming for. That's terrible. Given what I saw in the video, I didn't even feel like looking at the data. I have to drive the line that we pick, not wander all over the place.


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At the end of the day, Jason wins the class by 11 thousandths. Nice close run. Of course, that's not so nice for me, but what a team effort. Nobody else in STS made it into the 59 second range. Jason also finished the event paxing in the top 10! I think that's a first. Woohee!