Playing with Porsches, 4/22/07

Jason and I were originally signed up to go and play with the Santa Barbara region Porsche club out at Camarillo airport. 3 days before the event, we receive an email that the event was being postponed due to possible 30% chance of rain (it did end up raining in Camarillo).

Since there were 3 events this weekend and the new front bar wasn't installed yet, we decided that we'd go play with the Orange County Porsche club instead of CSCC so that we'd have a chance to kill off what was left of our tires.

It was a beautiful day, not too hot and not as windy as forecast. The course on the other hand was interesting - it used two separate runways and the crossover. On the way out, the course was slow and technical. The crossover was flat out with no gates to go through until we were getting off the crossover onto the other runway. The return runway was very much a power course. I figured it would be hard for us to be faster than the Porsches today unless they really screwed up the technical part (and many did). Maybe screwed up is harsh. Most of the drivers don't have the knowledge of how to run an autocross fast. I talked to Tony and just from our chat, he took 2 seconds off his previous fastest time.

By the end of the day, when we were running our timed runs, it was clear the tires were done and going away. Jason ended up running on corded tires and you could see his times getting slower with each run.

Still a good day out. We ended up with only 9 out of 75 Porsches faster than us at the end of the day. I thought it would be more.

The side by side video that Jason put together was interesting. Both of us are very close most of the way through until the fast section where I take a small lead (about 1 car length). I'm surprised at the difference in time though. I didn't realize that 1 car length in the Civic is 1+ seconds. I asked Jason to just focus on getting closer to the cones - the video shows very clearly that he is much closer to the cones now. In some places, even closer than me. Time to start getting closer to the cones myself.