Cal Club Autocross Forums

Marshall Grice wrote: I have to say though it was quite impressive to lay out a course on nearly 1 million square feet and not have 1 straight away.

The drag strip is on the other side of the speedway! Quoted from Mark Daddio "there are no straights in solo, just connecting one corner to the next, except the start of a ProSolo"

Ahh, yes, the sucky lateral grip of a street prepared car on Hoosiers!

I loved the course Sunday although it took a toll on the engine causing me to skip the 4th run. Saturdays course on street tires was an exercise in throttle steer, my appologies to the guys at the wallom and the finish line. Well your testing and tunning the Supra you could run non-pax BSP.

By the way kudo's to whomever laid out grid. The 4 or 5 cars per lane worked nicely. With all respect it was also very nice that their wasn't an over concentration on multi driver cars. Last event I got hung up sitting for up to 15+ minutes more than once, didn't happen this time. Only long waits were for timing and scoring issues and they were few. Liked the avoidance of torn up course or the bump. (found out after being under the car that I holed the pan on the drivers side on it).

Eric Clements wrote:

Marshall Grice wrote: I have to say though it was quite impressive to lay out a course on nearly 1 million square feet and not have 1 straight away.

The drag strip is on the other side of the speedway! Quoted from Mark Daddio "there are no straights in solo, just connecting one corner to the next, except the start of a ProSolo"

hey i'd be cool with it if our index wasn't based on killing little civics on at least 1 straight.

and again just to be clear, I liked the course. I only bring it up because of how much crap people have gotten for designing "power courses" that it only be fair to note that this course was just as biased only in the opposite direction.

Arthur Grant wrote: Liked the avoidance of torn up course or the bump. (found out after being under the car that I holed the pan on the drivers side on it).

we sheared our front sway bar into two pieces during one of our air displays. Kurt said, and I agree, that people will be finding broken stuff on their cars for months from that bump.

I didn't run this past weekend so don't have first hand knowledge of the course but the people I talked to said it was good. Jon liked it, he told us about his mad driving skills drifting mid-engine car , he just wished he wasn't stuck with a DP index while driving a SK2ES car on 4yr old tires.

For those who missed it last time around, courses are supposed to biased towards handling and agility rather than speed or power. Clippage from the 2011 Solo rules

1.2.1 A Solo Event is a non-speed driving skill contest such as, but not limited to, autocrosses and slaloms. These events are run on short courses that emphasize car handling and agility rather than speed or power.

2.COURSE Solo courses should be open enough to allow good competition between larger and smaller cars, and should not emphasize high speed, power-to-weight ratio, extreme maneuverability, memory, or visual acu-ity.

Results show we did have good competition between larger and smaller cars. Solstice is wider than a Corvette and we all know the Civic is small. If the course was all one speed I can see that being less fun, but that's certainly better than the tight corners followed by open section courses that rewards having power and doesn't emphasize driving skill.

Eric Clements wrote:I didn't run this past weekend so don't have first hand knowledge of the course but the people I talked to said it was good. Jon liked it, he told us about his mad driving skills drifting mid-engine car , he just wished he wasn't stuck with a DP index while driving a SK2ES car on 4yr old tires.

For those who missed it last time around, courses are supposed to biased towards handling and agility rather than speed or power. Clippage from the 2011 Solo rules

1.2.1 A Solo Event is a non-speed driving skill contest such as, but not limited to, autocrosses and slaloms. These events are run on short courses that emphasize car handling and agility rather than speed or power.

2.COURSE Solo courses should be open enough to allow good competition between larger and smaller cars, and should not emphasize high speed, power-to-weight ratio, extreme maneuverability, memory, or visual acu-ity.

Results show we did have good competition between larger and smaller cars. Solstice is wider than a Corvette and we all know the Civic is small. If the course was all one speed I can see that being less fun, but that's certainly better than the tight corners followed by open section courses that rewards having power and doesn't emphasize driving skill.

Results are proof enough, i say it again. It's really only an issue for the Indexed Classes. As a CASOC member I certainly don't complain, and I thought the course was fun.

Eric Clements wrote:
If the course was all one speed I can see that being less fun, but that's certainly better than the tight corners followed by open section courses that rewards having power and doesn't emphasize driving skill.

For the civic's, I bet it was nearly all one speed!! For QV and I it was close to being all one speed (slow) except he had to stop a couple of times because he was going backwards..... }:) }:)

Actually, I liked the course and it would have been a great course for our car, if it behaved like it should-----but, the course was nearly one speed!! By putting QV's and my best sections together, we would have had a slowest speed of 39 and a fastest speed of 52 and I bet that there were ST cars with a difference of less than 10-12 mph from fastest to slowest----maybe 57-58 on the top and mid 40's to the high 40's on the bottom....

After we sort out the current problems with the Sprite, it keeps wanting to see where it has been, make every course like this one!!!

Don

Marshall Grice wrote:

Will Kalman wrote:
Besides, Marshall already stated, above, that horsepower was a disadvantage. Shoulda turned it down - LOL }:)

i know you're just kidding but turning down the power wouldn't fix our sucky lateral grip.

quick! to the SCCAForums to start a thread about combining ST with BSP because clearly they're just as fast as us!

Try an Evo on skinny street tires. Fun course, but wish the first and last slalom spacing was opened up about 5 feet!

Richard Jung wrote:
Try an Evo on skinny street tires. Fun course, but wish the first and last slalom spacing was opened up about 5 feet!

Slalom on Saturday was a little painful. But on Sunday??? Not every car and driver has the right to go through every slalom flat.

Don Salyers wrote:I bet that there were ST cars with a difference of less than 10-12 mph from fastest to slowest----maybe 57-58 on the top and mid 40's to the high 40's on the bottom.

The cross-hair marker is the turn before the wallom. Whether to call this speed range compressed or not is an interesting question. Most of us do not want to dig out of a 25mph corner often (if ever!) and 60mph in an ST car means that you're probably pushing the upper legal limit for faster ones. I heard the Berry Evo on the rev limiter on the way to the first 90-degree left. I show 1.1g turns (sucky lateral g's on 195-width street tires <grin>). Marshall, got a speed plot?

Kurt Rahn wrote:

John Stimson wrote:But that was a wicked fun sweeper, nonetheless.

I don't think I've ever understeered so continuously for that distance. I basically turned the wheel and left it in position, then controlled the understeer with the throttle. It was fun!

I, on the other hand, have never gone into a 4-wheel slide/drift as long as this past Sunday.

Vincent Wong wrote:I, on the other hand, have never gone into a 4-wheel slide/drift as long as this past Sunday.

Yeah, I had a fair amount of that on cold tires as well. The rear end desperately wanted to get to corner exits faster than the front end.

Will Kalman wrote:

Don Salyers wrote:I bet that there were ST cars with a difference of less than 10-12 mph from fastest to slowest----maybe 57-58 on the top and mid 40's to the high 40's on the bottom.

The cross-hair marker is the turn before the wallom. Whether to call this speed range compressed or not is an interesting question. Most of us do not want to dig out of a 25mph corner often (if ever!) and 60mph in an ST car means that you're probably pushing the upper legal limit for faster ones. I heard the Berry Evo on the rev limiter on the way to the first 90-degree left. I show 1.1g turns (sucky lateral g's on 195-width street tires <grin>). Marshall, got a speed plot?

I'm not sure what you're arguing in favor of Will, but I did do a speed plot of every course we ever drove in the BMW since I started with Toby about half way through last year. Turns only once did we ever have a slower than 25mph corner, it was that course Guy did with the loop at the start and the super slow left hander. Almost every other course had a slowest corner on course that was between 25-30. The average slowest corner on course speed was 27.58mph, 27.9mph if you only count national courses.

Will Kalman wrote: The cross-hair marker is the turn before the wallom. Whether to call this speed range compressed or not is an interesting question. Most of us do not want to dig out of a 25mph corner often (if ever!) and 60mph in an ST car means that you're probably pushing the upper legal limit for faster ones. I heard the Berry Evo on the rev limiter on the way to the first 90-degree left. I show 1.1g turns (sucky lateral g's on 195-width street tires <grin>). Marshall, got a speed plot?

CivicSpeed.gif

37-59mph with one excursion to 62mph going into the first 90deg left. Worth noting that we hit our limiter 3mph early due to high slip ratio in the turn (only straight?) leading into the first 90deg turn.

Will, what's that crap------speed in MPH graphed against distance in Kilometers. I am losing respect--- }:) }:) .

Don

Aaron Goldsmith wrote:I'm not sure what you're arguing in favor of Will, but I did do a speed plot of every course we ever drove in the BMW since I started with Toby about half way through last year. Turns only once did we ever have a slower than 25mph corner, it was that course Guy did with the loop at the start and the super slow left hander. Almost every other course had a slowest corner on course that was between 25-30. The average slowest corner on course speed was 27.58mph, 27.9mph if you only count national courses.

You don't know what I'm arguing for because I'm not arguing for anything. Just looking at the data and pondering. Not all questions are leading ones.

You've clearly got more (and better kept) data than I do as I've been keeping it haphazardly over the last couple years and spread over several different cars (HS, CS, and ST), so I find it interesting. So given that information, do we consider this past course as having significant speed compression or not? I guess you could take your data and figure the ratio of highest speed to lowest speed for each course. Or the ratio of highest and lowest speeds to the average. And it doesn't take into account the number of accel/decel events on a given course. Maybe an integration of acceleration compared to ??? ? My brain hurts.

But Marshall is right that his BSP index is based on the assumption that there are straights where he can slaughter an ST Civic. Not really the same argument that Eric is making about the course style, which is however, a related factor. Making all courses like this last one would result in index adjustments where the Evo would be classed in FSP where it belongs - LOL!

Don Salyers wrote:Will, what's that crap------speed in MPH graphed against distance in Kilometers. I am losing respect--- }:) }:)

People are always trying to change things. You give 'em an inch and they take a kilometer!

Will Kalman wrote:But Marshall is right that his BSP index is based on the assumption that there are straights where he can slaughter an ST Civic. Not really the same argument that Eric is making about the course style, which is however, a related factor. Making all courses like this last one would result in index adjustments where the Evo would be classed in FSP where it belongs - LOL!

Will Kalman wrote: But Marshall is right that his BSP index is based on the assumption that there are straights where he can slaughter an ST Civic. Not really the same argument that Eric is making about the course style, which is however, a related factor. Making all courses like this last one would result in index adjustments where the Evo would be classed in FSP where it belongs - LOL!

exactly.

Will Kalman wrote: Making all courses like this last one would result in index adjustments where the Evo would be classed in FSP where it belongs - LOL!

Where it would get beat by an EG civic!

Will Kalman wrote:
You've clearly got more (and better kept) data than I do as I've been keeping it haphazardly over the last couple years and spread over several different cars (HS, CS, and ST), so I find it interesting. So given that information, do we consider this past course as having significant speed compression or not? I guess you could take your data and figure the ratio of highest speed to lowest speed for each course. Or the ratio of highest and lowest speeds to the average. And it doesn't take into account the number of accel/decel events on a given course. Maybe an integration of acceleration compared to ??? ? My brain hurts.

But Marshall is right that his BSP index is based on the assumption that there are straights where he can slaughter an ST Civic. Not really the same argument that Eric is making about the course style, which is however, a related factor. Making all courses like this last one would result in index adjustments where the Evo would be classed in FSP where it belongs - LOL!

Average low to high difference was almost exactly 40mph. Given away all my data for free today, haha.

It's interesting having data for almost every run for every driver since the end of 07.

Richard Jung wrote:

Marshall Grice wrote:

Will Kalman wrote:

Try an Evo on skinny street tires. Fun course, but wish the first and last slalom spacing was opened up about 5 feet!

I bet the evo had an easier time than a C4 corvette which weighs 3450lbs (with driver) and has 250 hp. But I liked it none the less. Wish I could have taken the 4th run, I know I had a 51+ out there without question.

Arthur Grant wrote: I bet the evo had an easier time than a C4 corvette which weighs 3450lbs (with driver) and has 250 hp. But I liked it none the less. Wish I could have taken the 4th run, I know I had a 51+ out there without question.

holy cow, a bsp c4 should weigh about 3100(with out driver) and make 325hp.