Your First Autocross

So, it's the day of your first event. You're excited, you didn't sleep well the night before, and it's dawning on you that you're about to do things in your car most people would describe as "not safe". Take a deep breath, calm down, and enjoy yourself. I've listed a few things you need to do at your first event.

Before You Even Get There

Make sure you get there early! I suggest arriving shortly after they open the gates. This allows you to find a nice paddock spot, get your car prepped, walk the course, and still have time to walk around and get to know people. My post, 9 Things a Novice Should Bring to an Autocross has a list of things you should bring to the event.

Before The Race Starts

You're at the event, now what? Take anything not nailed down out of the car. Things like the spare tire, tools, dead bodies, and the drivers floor mat should come out. This includes loose change in the cup holder, things hanging from the rear view mirror, and loose items in the trunk. Check your tire pressures. They should be higher than you usually run on the street since the cornering loads will roll the tire over on the sidewall. Get your car teched. Most clubs have a lane where they can inspect your car for safety. Register and pay for the event and get your class and number. Put your numbers on your car, usually with painters tape, in a size and color that would be easy to read as you fly by the corner workers. Blue tape on a black car is hard to read so make sure you use contrasting colors! 

Now that the car is ready, it's time to walk the course, repeatedly. I recommend at least 3 course walks, and if you can tag along with some folks that seem to know what they are doing, even better. I'm not kidding when I say at least 3 times walking the course! The biggest issue novices have is they get lost when they make their first runs since the course can look like a see of cones! Many clubs have a Novice Walk Through where a veteran driver will walk the novices through the course, pointing out where you should be and generally giving you good tips.

Your First Runs

First off, get someone that's done this for a while to ride along with you for at least the first run. They will help you not get lost and give you pointers on what you did right and wrong. Second, do not bonzai the first runs!! Think of your brain as a computer, and on your first runs you need a lot of processing power just to figure out where you are going. This leaves little processing for going fast, so if you try to go mach 1 you will completely forget where to go. Fortunately, your brain will remember the course and you will find that each consecutive run get's faster. You should have both hands on the wheel at all times, except to shift into second.

Working

Autocross is a volunteer sport. This means you need to work the course while others are taking their runs. It may be hot, raining, or generally uncomfortable at times but it's required, and it's a good time to chat with fellow racers.

Down Time

At most events you will run one heat, work one heat, and have another one off. Take advantage of the down time by riding along with other racers, watching other's runs, or getting help from vets. When riding with others it's a good idea to ride in cars similar to yours.

The End of the Event

After your runs and after you have worked the course, it's time to pack it up. Make sure you clean up your trash, return your loaner helmet, and help clean up the course. Some clubs do novice trophies at the end of the event so stick around for the bling! Also, don't forget to adjust your tire pressures back down to normal levels before the drive home.

Novice Car Prep Before An Event

So you've signed up for your first autocross or track event and now you need to make sure your car is up to the task. Here is a list of the most common things novices need to do to their cars before they even get to the event.

Safety Check

You need to make sure your car is safe for the event. Keep in mind that your car will be asked to do things far in excess of what it would do on the street so "safe to drive" isn't always "safe to race". This is especially true for track events, where you can easily wear out a new set of brake pads in one event. Check your tires, are they worn out? Are they dry rotted? Replace them! Are your brake pads more than halfway through their lives? Replace them! Brake fluid more than three years old? Get it replaced! Fluid leaks? Get them fixed! No one wants to drive through the oil dripping from your car.

Battery Tie Down

This is such a common issue with novice's cars that it deserves it's own section. Your battery must be secured with tie downs (factory is best) and be unable to slide off it's tray. Zip ties work in a pinch but shouldn't be a permanent solution.

Empty Out Your Car

If it's not nailed down and not required for the trip to and from the event you should get it out of the car. Clean out the back seat, empty the trunk, and get the junk out of the glove box. These things all fly around on course and at the least make a lot distracting noise and at worse fly around and hit you or fly out an open window.

Check The Oil

Your car is going to be pushing g-forces it would never see on the street and if it's getting low on oil you could have a serious problem on course when your car starves of oil in a turn and destroys itself. Top off the oil before every event.

Fill Up With Gas

Much like oil listed above, your car needs to be nearly full of gas before the event or it will start starving for fuel and slow you down. Personally, I always fill the tank the morning of the event to be safe.

You Are Responsible For The Health Of Your Car

Most people will agree that cars today require far less maintenance than they used to. Oil changes go past 5,000 miles, spark plugs are only every 100,000 miles or so, tune ups are all but gone, and cars even tell you if you have a low tire. While this is great it has led to a general feeling that you never have to worry about anything about your car but this is far from the truth! We still need to pay attention to our cars and in the end, it's you, the owner, that's responsible for it's health. Heeding some of the advice listed below will not only make your car more reliable, but it will also allow you to get to know more about how it works.

Check Your Oil Regularly

Many people assume new cars don't consume oil when in fact, across all makes, oil consumption warranty claims are on the rise. Mix the higher oil consumption rates with extremely long oil change intervals and people soon find their cars running out of oil! In pretty much every owners manual it recommends you check your oil every thousand miles. It's not a lot to ask since for most folks that's only once a month, and it could save you some serious trouble down the road.

Check Your Tires

All new cars are now required to have a tire pressure monitoring system that warns you if one of your tires is getting low. These systems are not fool proof however and it would be wise to know how they work, what their limitations are, and how to check the pressures yourself. Doing this while you're checking your oil is a good idea. If you find a tire consistently loosing a couple pounds per month you can get it checked and repaired before it leaves you stranded. Pay attention to the tread depth while you're doing this so you can plan early for the rather expensive tire replacement down the road.

Know How To Change A Tire

This one comes up so often these days. Yes, getting a flat and having to put on a spare on the side of the road, in the summer, in nice clothes sucks so very bad, but getting a flat in a place where you have no cell phone signal and you don't know what to do is MUCH worse! I have family in West Texas and there is a good chunk of I-10 where I lose reception. Picture getting a flat in the high desert, in 120 degree heat, with no ability to call for help. Not a pleasant thought is it? Go learn how to change a tire, please......

Open The Hood And Have A Look

Ok, sure, you most likely will not know what you're looking at but that's not the point. Checking under the hood will give you heads up if you're about to have car trouble. Things like oil leaks, power steering leaks, and coolant leaks are all obvious things to look for but there's more to see under there. Every cold snap we get a surge of people with strange electrical issues, bad smells, and check engine lights and the first thing I do is pop the hood of their car and see rodent droppings, nests and chewed up wiring. Most of the time it's pretty obvious the critter has been living in the car for quite some time and had the owner simply checked under the hood they could have saved a hefty repair bill.

We're now more than a generation beyond the time where a car's owner needed to know how to do all these things so don't feel dumb if you need someone to show you how to do the checks I listed above. Since the lives of most technicians, mechanics, and advisers would be easier if folks knew more about the cars they are driving you shouldn't have any trouble finding someone to happily take a few minutes to show you how to keep a better eye on your car.

Learning To Drive Faster

So you've been racing or autocrossing for a while and now you're ready to take it to the next level. Let's talk about some tools and ideas for improving yourself:

Read Books About The Sport

There are some great books out there on the subject of being a faster driver. The book, Going Faster! Mastering The Art Of Race Driving by Carl Lopez and Danny Sullivan is an Excellent place to start but by no means the only one you should read. Read those books, read them again, and put what you learn to good use.

Go To Racing Schools

There are a number of great schools designed to teach you to be a better driver. For autocross I've attended the Evolution Performance Driving School and was a great experience. They hold events all over the country and they have different programs for the various skill levels of drivers. For road racers therer are schools at pretty much every track as well as places like Bondurant Racing School in Arizona.

Get A Camera And Record Your Runs

If you record your runs and review them back to back you may see places where you are strong and places where you are weak. Of course, the go to camera is the GoPro and their GoPro Hero4 Silver seems to be the latest one for recording racing. Even better than just recording your runs, have a better driver co-drive in your car and compare recordings side by side. This way you will easily see where you can improve, and you will know what to do to improve.

Ride Along With Pros

Every group has those drivers that are pulling amazing times. They are usually nationals attendees and some clubs even have some champions in their ranks. See if you can ride along with them multiple times during an event so you can learn from what they do. Heck, off to buy them lunch for their troubles and pick their brains while you eat.

Have A Better Driver Co-Drive Your Car

This is a nice cheap way to learn to go faster. Have someone that is a better driver then you share your car for an event and watch what they do. Ride along on their runs and have them ride with you and critique. Just be sure to listen to what they say!

Get A Data Logger

Lately there have been a number of apps geared toward our sport come out and from what I've seen they can be a great tool. These programs are capable of recording exactly where you are on course and your speed. They show you, down to the inch, how far off the apex of a turn you were as well as corner entry, corner exit, and straight away speeds. Most work with iOS or Android so they really don't require much in the way of equipment, save for a much improved GPS antenna and OBD plug in. I'm planning on giving Solostorm a try since it seems to be the go to app for autocrossing.

**All of the links to Amazon in this post are affiliate links, by clicking on them and buying an item Amazon kicks a little back to support the blog, but this does not in any way change the price of the item.

Novices Are The Club's Future

Autocross is a beginner sport. Yes, a lot of us stick around doing it for decades and we take it very seriously, but in the end the sport is geared for the novice. The safety is high for motor sport, the cost is low, and most clubs have a person whose sole job is to make sure the new folk know what to do.

Clubs should do everything they can to make sure novices keep coming back!

All clubs have attrition. Veterans move away or burn out and clubs need a constant flow of new blood or they will soon find themselves with few participants and fewer members to run things.

Here are some tips to make sure the new people enjoy themselves and want to come back:

Make A Novice Class

Most clubs do this thankfully. It gives the novices a place to compete against their peers and not feel out skilled by those who have decades of experience. That being said, it should be everyone's goal to graduate the novices out of the novice class and into the open classes.

Pay Attention To The Novices!

Novices should be taken under the wings of the veterans. More novices get frustrated and don't come back due to simply being overwhelmed and not knowing what to do. Clubs should make a few work assignments for hanging around in grid, riding along with every novice there. Clubs usually do this for the first timers and those that are getting lost repeatedly, but all of the novices could use help and most would love someone riding shotgun giving go-fast tips.

Give Out Trophies

Novices LOVE to bring home trophies. There should always be a trophy ceremony after every event to give out the bling. Also, the club could make a rule that the trophies are handed out only after the course is cleaned up so there is always plenty of help at the end of the day. Trophies give the novice something tangible to shoot for as well as give them something to show off to friends who may decide to give it a shot themselves.

Remember, Novices Are New

Well, duh. I know it sounds obvious but veterans need to remember that novices are new. This means novices don't know they are suggesting the same ideas that have been beaten to death for years. It means they will ask about potential venues not realizing the club has been turned down there for decades. When a novice gives a suggestion, take them seriously, and if it's something that cannot be done respectfully let them know why and thank them for being involved. The last thing a club should want is the veterans acting like an elite clique and making the novice feel unwanted. I'm not saying do everything the novices suggest, I'm just saying that if they are taking the time and effort to come up with ideas and present them to the club it means they are willing to be invested in the sport and that they are someone the club wants to hold onto.

Don't Mock The Novices

Sure it's easy to poke fun of the things some novices say and do but all it does it make them not want to come back. First timers often come in thinking they are the next racing god and quickly get schooled by lesser cars with better drivers, they have cars with modifications they thought were good but in reality only make them slower, and they will likely not walk the course enough and get lost. We were all noobs at one point so don't make fun of them. You may think it's harmless and funny since the veterans around you laugh at the jokes but it's only going to drive the novices away.

Novices and Car Modifications

After getting a few events under your belt, it's natural to start thinking of ways to make your car faster, but in the beginning you are the slowest part of your car. For at least the first season your car has much higher limits then you do and making it faster really isn't helping you. Thankfully, you are also the cheapest mod in that as you get more experience you will naturally start getting faster. $25 to $35 for an event can improve you by over a second when a new exhaust might only take a tenth of a second! Here are some points to consider as a novice:

Your Car

As a novice you're most likely not showing up at your first event with a perfect race car. It's most likely not powerful, with stock, or even worse, cheap aftermarket suspension, average brakes, and all season tires. It probably hasn't had even a stock alignment for some time, much less a performance alignment, and was designed more for comfort or efficiency than performance. In other words, it's a perfectly normal, average car. This is a good thing! It has low limits on track which makes it a great car to learn on. As a novice, you need to learn how to drive your car just below it's limits, and with a normal car those limits are easier to reach. Yes, you will blow right by those limits in your first event and push through turns, miss apexes, and basically make a lot of noise, but you will eventually start to learn where those limits are and learn to run just below them. Trust me, you will know when you are better than the car and it will not happen as soon as you think it will.

Upgrade Your Car As Things Wear Out

Run those poor all season tires until they wear out and only then do you get some better ones. This way when you raise the limits of the car through better traction, you will naturally go faster to match it. Since you've learned how the car feels as it reaches the limit you will always follow the car's limit when it goes up. Tires, alignment, and brake pads are all good modifications to make as they wear out. Upgrades like suspension add too much variability and as a novice you may accidentally make the handling worse.

Catch Up on Maintenance

If your car is more then 5 years old you should make sure all it's parts are in good shape. Things like motor mounts, suspension bushings, filters, valve adjustments, and fluids will all need attention and all of them will help the car perform better. Taking care of the car will also make the car less likely to break under the strains of racing and also make it more reliable as a daily driver to boot!

Be patient! You will get better! Racing is a skill that takes time to master and rushing it will lead to frustration.

5 Things You Should Know About How a Service Department Works

I've worked on a service drive for over 5 years now, and have found the biggest reason for unhappy customers is a lack of understanding on how the system works. This is not a knock on our customers, they shouldn't be expected to know everything about the process. It's our job as advisers to help them understand the things they need to know. Here is a list of five things customers should know about a service department:

Appointments

This is the biggest source of friction between advisers and customers. An appointment is simply a way for the service department to control how many cars are checked in on a given day. It does not mean there is a technician waiting, with tools in hand, for you to arrive. It would make all our lives much easier if it worked like that but it simply cannot and here is why:

Even though a customer will typically give us an idea of what is going on with their car, we really cannot know just how long the diagnosis and repair will take. Will your air conditioning problem be a 1.5 hour evacuate and recharge and check for leaks, or will it be a 6 plus hour evaporator replacement? My dealership averages about 50 cars a day, not including express oil changes, so if repairs on that day's cars takes even an hour longer each it causes enormous delays. This means that even though you have a 10am appointment, the 20 cars that have gone into the shop since we opened may have taken more than doubled the time they were expected to, and now your car won't be looked at till much later in the day.

Honesty

This is a tough one. Nobody likes to be taken advantage of, and since most customers don't know much about cars it is easy for them to think someone is trying to profit from their ignorance. When an adviser is telling you that your car, that seems to be running fine, needs over a thousand dollars of work it's understandable to be skeptical. Something I wish more customers would do is ask us to bring them into the shop and show them why we are recommending a repair. It builds trust in me, it allows the customer to learn more about their car, and it helps justify the costs when they actually see what needs to be done. If you, as a customer, don't believe what you are being told, have the adviser show you the issue, and if you still don't feel right get a second opinion.

Diagnostic Charges

Dealerships charge to diagnose a problem to protect their most valuable assets, the technicians. A technician is constantly going to expensive training to learn about the cars they work on and it never ends. We have a few at my dealership that have been doing this for over 20 years and they still go for week long training stints out of town. They do this so they can be an expert on finding out what's wrong with a car. Anyone, with enough time and tools, can replace most parts of a car. It takes a professional to know which part actually needs to be replaced in the first place! There are a lot of people that do their own repairs as well as independent shops that work on all makes that call on us to help them find the problem. The diagnostic charges cover the factory trained technician's time and effort for finding the problem for you. Most places will waive the charges if you have them do the work.

Warranty Work

I've met a number of people that think the dealership is financially responsible for warranty repairs. This is absolutely not true! The manufacturer pays the dealership for any and all warranty charges as part of the franchise agreement. It's a free repair to the customer and we still get paid to do it. It's a win-win situation! So why do some repairs get declined? Advisers hate telling a customer the repair won't be covered but we must be honest with the manufacturer just like we are with you. If your kid jumps on the center console and breaks it, then it wasn't a defect, so it's not going to be warrantied.

Mistakes

Advisers are human, techs are human, and our customers are human. This means mistakes will happen, a car won't be fixed correctly, and it makes for a very unhappy customer. We understand we will make these mistakes, and all we really want when we do is to have a chance to make it right. Please, if you're a customer and something doesn't go right, calmly talk to your adviser or the manager and give them a chance to make you happy. We know it's frustrating to spend a lot of money only to pick up your car and the problem wasn't resolved, and a good repair shop will take care of you. Some of my best customers are ones where we didn't do something right and it upset them. We earned their loyalty by taking responsibility and dealing with the mistake.