Autocross 3/30 at ADSI Quonset RI

Hi everyone - 

The t-shirt order has shipped and should be here in a few days!! While we wait on that, the big news this weekend is that the first autocross of the season, hosted by ADSI, is this Sunday (30th) on the airfield at Quonset Point!!!

I just negotiated a bit of a special offer to boot - the gentleman who runs the operation was kind enough to extend an offer to you - the ACF crew - to come see what its like with no strings attached (in Rhodonics that equals FREE!). You can come on down, take a look, even take one run in either your car or mine - and see what you think before you have to fork over any of your hard earned pennies. I let him know we wouldn’t abuse the offer so please recognize that this is a big exception to the rules for us and treat it accordingly.

So unless you are stuck at Chuck-E-Cheese’s playing Whack-a-mole on Sunday afternoon, its only 1/2 hour south of Providence to see what you and/or your car can do on a very safe, wide-open circuit - with the first lap on the house! And as long as you don’t burn up my clutch (we won’t name names here…) you are welcome to give it a run in my “race bus”, at least that’s what I have to call it to get the kids to go to school.

The one after this will be 4/27, then 5/18 so if you are eating cardboard pizza this round, there are more opportunities as well.

Directions (you know you are coming so give it a look):

295S to 95S to Rt4 to North Kingston. 

Take exit 7B onto 403 East/french town road toward Quonset. Take the Davisville road exit. 

Take Davisville to Thompson road. 

You should see new cars in lots on your left. 

You'll take a right onto Thompson through some gates. There might be some little signs but I wouldn’t count on it. There will be a car to let you in down the road a bit. 

If you have an some intention of running your car: you can fill in forms at 1adsi.com. $125 at the door and you'll need to have the tech inspection sheet filled out. The biggest thing is that you want to have had a brake fluid flush within the past 12 months. Water can get into your brake fluid and its not good for stopping when you want to. Also good to make sure you’ve got at least 1/2 the meat left on your brake pads (they usually start about 1.5cm thick on average) since you’ll be using up a bit of them if you do 10 or more laps. 

I’m still looking for anyone who might want to co-drive the April 28th (Monday night) endurance karting race. Your personal trainer will definitely thank me for this as it will be a good workout for body and mind since we have yet to figure out what the ideal pit strategy will be. For those of you who came to the prior karting events, this one uses both tracks put together - a configuration none of us have seen before. Should be pretty amazing. I’ll be doing reconaissance if I can’t find a co-driver so I’ll report back on what it looks like.

May you find a little more oversteer in the snow tomorrow!

-S 

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I will be going for the whole day including the driving school starting at 8am sharp in my Subaru Impreza hatchback. Nowhere near the opulent grip, fluid power and sense of control of a Porsche for sure, it's only a 4 cylinder but it will be a blast just the same!
— A posthaven user
Since you all love my emails, here is another: One more minor detail: the autocross starts at noon on Sunday. There is a Cornering Techniques Class that starts at 8am (need to be at the gates at 7:45) that Alberto and I are attending to see what its like and get in a few more laps. If you are coming at noon, we’ll already be there. If you want to come do the class with us, email ADSI for availability. So much for snowy oversteer today, eh? Slight slip on ice was all I could manage this morning. -S
— A posthaven user
Hello folks, Alberto and I had to call in Buddy Cianci to “persuade” ADSI to not cancel the autocross this past sunday, but it was well worth it. A couple of minor showers weren’t going to keep us from trying to get a little better at this car thing. Only 3 of us were there for instruction in the AM - Alberto, me and a nice guy named Matt who had a shiny new Scion FR-S that he had just put a supercharger into - himself! Its a rather tail happy car to begin with. And then he added about 250hp at the rear wheels! Its a wonder he wasn’t dizzy at the end of the day, he spun so much! But you couldn’t wipe the grin off his face either. With three instructors and only three students, you can’t get a much better ratio than that! And we got tons and tons of seat time to practice skills that would prove invaluable later in the day. We started off with a simple slalom between 4 cones about 60’ apart in a line. Sound easy? Then we “avoided the children” where you go 60mph into a box marked with cones, brake and turn to avoid the “kids” (cones) and then exit in the middle behind the “kids” - basically an emergency lane change type maneuver. Next we did some skid pad type circles to find the limit of grip of our tires and then worked to exceed the limit by drifting a figure 8 between two circular skid pads. Fun stuff. See my smoking tires in the video link below. Next up was the “string exercise”. Hard to describe, but if you look at the pattern of your shoelaces on sneakers, the laces make roughly the pattern we had to drive. We did it with no braking and then with some hard braking to see what was faster. The times told the story. Smooth is fast. And then it was afternoon and time for the full autocross course. About 10 or 15 cars arrived to join us on the course - including Alex in his hotted up 328 sedan in race-me-red with great wheels and new tires. The instructors gave us a good overview and sat with us for a few laps. I had some of them drive my car to see their technique and what to emulate. For a little while, the fastest-time-of-the-day was an instructor (Bill) in his Acura family sedan despite being up against M5’s, Porsches, Audi S4’s, an S2000 race car and a few Subaru’s. As the rain (deluge) started to subside, the times came down and a 1:35 went on the board for fastest of the day title. It was a little colder and a lot wetter than any of us had hoped, for sure. But with the meek scared off, the hard core found lots of laps and lots of learning. Alberto was shaving a second off each lap as the afternoon progressed. And none of us broke anything!! Here are a couple of videos of the action so you can get a taste while still being able to feel your toes and feet: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC15uNTLJ6DrXT-... Hope more of you can join us - especially for the instruction if you can. Anthony and his crew don’t provide frills or fluff. But they deliver good information in a way that really takes into account each person and what they need to know to make them better. With Skip Barber school at Lime Rock Park at $1500 per day and a six-hour-round-trip, ADSI at $250 per day is a great bargain and you’ll get far more driving way closer to home. The next autocross/instruction day is 4/27. Then 5/18, 7/20, 8/17, 10/19 and 11/9. Only 6 more chances to learn a lot and have a good bit of fun.
— A posthaven user
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