SOLO II

When I say ‘car racing,’ do you picture Dale Earnhardt, Tide logos, and perpetual left turns? If yes, I personally apologize for the damage NASCAR has done to America. But even NASCAR was born of stock car racing. Stock car racing was equalizing, democratic, plebian. It was cheap, it was everyman. Today that has been bought up and sold back to us complete with multi-million dollar cars and even more expensive egos.
But then again, I don’t think I’d ever actually utter the words ‘car racing.’ That’s a far too clunky way to word what we do. Most of my local friends are fans of car go fast. But not so much fans of the watching of other people driving, because, what’s the point? There is a school of thought that says driving cars fast is a right of all true Americans and that it wasn’t ever taken away from us. That school is SCCA.

For us amateur beginner younglings, this means autocross. Take a parking lot, an airport landing strip, any reasonably flat strip of asphalt, and set upon it a course marked with pylons. Drive through said course. Next time, try and do it faster. This is autocross. The land of Miatas and Minis. FDs and Z06s. Karts and dirt-track racers.
Sunday was the first event of the season. Chris and Allie came to drive his Miata. Rusty and I showed up in his 8 hour old Z. Chad and his Maxima didn’t make the drive. (I would have brought my Nissan [which would be a middling to good car to drive autocross] for my first time autocrossing if I hadn’t taken a culvert too fast and lost oil pressure and spun a bearing and effectively toasted the engine two weeks ago.) As I was, I just rode along.
Autocross separates drivers first, cars second. There is usually a wide range of cars at an event, from daily drivers to go-carts to trailered-in race only vehicles. The skill with which you set a line, shift, brake, and recover from mistakes sets your time far more than the horsepower to can put to pavement. This is no quarter mile drag. For most cars 2nd gear is used almost exclusively. No one will go above 40mph. Which sounds incredibly boring, I know. It took some cajoling to get me to go to my first. But one ride in a well driven car will convince you otherwise. You experience Gs that you can only find legally on roller coasters. But the car you’re in isn’t riding along a predetermined path at premeditated speed. How fast, how in control, how smooth a ride will be entirely up to the driver.
We left before the event was over, but up till then, the fastest car through the course wasn’t one of the heavily modded Mustangs, wasn’t a Z06 Vette, wasn’t any of the Acuras, Audis, or Minis. It was this old Honda civic.

An extra link for you gear heads. The Real Acme, by that blathering idiot, Iowahawk. Old old drag car mods from NASA.