Yeah someone does autocross Elantras still, me Options

[cobas]

I did my first autocross today, hurricane Irene notwithstanding. It was with a local driving club my mechanic told me about. A bit cheaper than SCCA, this was only $40 per event, and that got me 6 runs about 50 seconds each. $40 for under 6 minutes of racing is expensive on a per-minute basis but you hang out with a bunch of gearheads for 5 hours and watch some nice cars get tossed around a cone track. And free drinks and $2 hotdogs.

I was thinking they might cancel the event due to rain... nope, we just raced in moderate rain. Some people liked racing in the rain, particularly new people (it makes for earlier skidding and lower-speed mistakes) and the AWD drivers. I knew an '03 Hyundai Elantra would be an underdog at a racing event but wow, those were some quick cars. The other slowest-looking cars were an old Neon and an even older GTI. The rest were Minis, Miatas, S2000s, WRXs, Evos, Corvettes... even two AC Cobras. We pitied them because it was raining, they had 400hp RWD cars and no roofs. I haven't looked at the results yet, I focused on trying to be smooth and not hit any cones, which I didn't. I was told the inside rear wheel was half a foot of the ground in tight corners. I know my lap times were about 55 seconds, then 53, 54, 54, 52 and 52, which is a nice progression. One of the 54's was with the A/C on and surprisingly one of the 52s was also with the A/C on (it was fogging up quickly between runs). Most people were in the 48-49 range, albeit with faster cars.

My problem was mainly hand position on the steering wheel and looking only 2 sets of cones ahead instead of 3. The car's problem was mostly low speed understeer. The faster curves around 30mph+ were not badly balanced, but the slow 10mph hairpins it just plowed if I carried too much speed.

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