Automobile Club de FASRI

The weather was looking a bit threatening with showers over South County. That made me quite happy since my all-wheel-drive car loves to play in the rain. But I don't need much more than an open runway to be happy in the first place. It looked like it was going to be another beautiful day of learning to drive better and maybe a bit faster. Once again, ADSI did not disappoint.

The morning class looked like it might be about the normal size when I pulled up. There was an M3 race car on a trailer behind a pickup. A shiny new Dodge Challenger (blue with black stripes if I recall) and chrome dubs. An F250 (huh?). And me. As I said hello to some familiar faces, up rolls an Aston Martin. Drop dead gorgeous. Such power and presence. It turned out to be a DB9 in a dark gray shade. I suddenly felt like I should have gotten Earl Gray instead of my gas station coffee. 12 cylinders of English awesomeness. And the owner of this beauty turns about to be another FASRI dad! Welcome to the club, Fred!! Then we achieved one more. A blacked out BMW 135 (M? not M? I can't even tell anymore! What's going on BMW!!!) pulled up. And we were ready to go.

After dropping our stuff and getting to know everyone a little better, we got into the 4 cone slalom for warmup. It turned out that only the 135, DB9, and my Targa were in the class right off. Jessica would be coming a little later in here insane GTI. With only three of us, we did maybe 20 runs at the slalom each in 40 minutes. Such great practice. Getting so much seat time with so little wait time really accelerates how quickly you learn and become comfortable at speed. I found myself becoming more consistent with the throttle around 46 or 47mph. And the big breakthrough was staying in the throttle past the second cone. I'd been backing off as the car gets to the hairy edge - pesky self-preservation instinct or something. But finally I was able to sense the car starting to dance and feel how it will still do amazing things - AS LONG AS YOU DON'T LIFT!! Training yourself to be precise, to use your peripheral vision much more than you think possible, and to have the cojones to use the throttle to stabilize the car at the edge: great lessons for the day.

Next up was a bit of a treat. We got nine or ten cones in a row spaced about 75 feet apart as a monster slalom. With more space, you need more speed to get to the limit. And with more cones, you can play with the car's reactions at the limit for more time. And more play is a good thing. I found my car was near the limit at about 67mph for this course. It was interesting to exceed that speed for one section and see how you paid for it on the next. That's hard to get on the 4 cone version. It was yet another great thing to learn and do.

Then we moved on to walking the short autocross track to talk about the line, the apices, and braking points. I'm always surprised by how much thinking and planning you have to do to understand a course. And then I'm even more surprised by how hard it is to put this new knowledge into practice when you get out onto it at speed. But you can't learn if you don't practice, so we scrutinized the radii, found our apices, talked about how different cars may enjoy different lines, and generally tried to look like we understood everything the instructors said.

After that, we got about a half hour of running the short course. We walked the longer course next and then drove that (and the short one too) for about an hour. I got more runs in than my tires could handle. It was just lap after lap after lap. Really great. I see why endurance racing is so hard. The tires really do play a critical role in how fast you can run and how long you can stay out. I was losing two or three seconds per lap when my tires overheated even when my driving was improving.

I tried a few new things on the video technology side this time out. My goal was to get simultaneous video of both the course outside and my actions working the controls inside the car. I had my phone sucking in data from my OBD II device via two apps this time - TrackAddictHD and Harry's Lap Timer. And I had a GoPro mounted inside the car with a big memory card and some spare batteries so it could just keep rolling. I knew it would be a PITA to edit down all this footage, but I thought it better to start with more and then review it to see how to optimize. 

Once again, the OBD II dongle was the first thing to go south on me. It worked well with TrackAddict for maybe two hours. Then no connection. Then it worked with Harry's Lap Timer (even though not working with TA at that moment) for another two hours maybe. Then it just didn't play well with anyone at all. Luckily the apps have GPS for some rudimentary speed info when OBD II is down. But I've found that speed and throttle position are the two things I like to see. Harry's Lap Timer proved to be about 4 times more complex than TA, unfortunately. At first Harry's seemed great - audio lap feedback, knowledge of an autocross standing start type of scenario (although I messed up the configuration at first and you only get one real shot before the track is hot). But then I started to see issues. Switching courses in Harry's app is painful. It seemed to want to set up a new course each time rather than being able to toggle back and forth. Can't do that and focus on driving. I found myself going back to TA because it was so much easier to deal with. All I really need is timing to know if I'm faster or slower. You'd think it wouldn't be this hard...

Once back at the ranch, I ran into another big difference between Harry's and TA - video overlay processing (where you put the data onto the video and then create the final video product). Harry's does it on your phone. And it isn't pretty. I've found that I need to hunt through the app (not easy) to find the video, export the overlay...and then watch my phone completely lock up to the point where I have to hard boot it. On restart, I can view the video and Harry's exported video is superior to TA. But getting to the better product is Dante-esque adventure, unfortunately. TA requires that I sync the files from my phone to my computer, but that's not hard. Then I use RaceRender3 to do the overlay. RaceRender is nice because I can choose my output style, do picture-in-picture (critical for my simultaneous in/out of car goal this time out), and it all happens on my laptop without crashing/booting.

Bottom line is that I may need to invest more time with Harry's to get more comfy with it and it has impressive capability, but the usability is far lower due to the extra complexity. I like simple when I don't have a pit crew to analyze my racecraft in real time. Which will probably never happen ever. But it was a good day for driving and experimenting and practice. All told, another amazing event!