Autocross, which is commonly abbreviated to autoX, is a sport in which drivers complete time trials around a course made up of cones. It sounds extremely easy, but the reality is that the courses are usually very tight and the cones come at you very quickly and you realize at the last moment that you are set up completely incorrectly for the corner you are about to enter which will only put you in an even worse position for the following corner. It’s a slippery slope that ends up with either spinning and hitting all the cones, or plowing straight through a corner and hitting all the cones.
Whether or not you enjoy the sport itself, it is impossible to deny that autocross is one of the most accessible ways to get into motor sports. The cost of entry is lower than most other car events, the risk is probably the lowest, there are very few requirements for vehicles, and the basic concepts apply to any motor sports event. For this reason I try and push people who call themselves “car people” but have never gone to a competitive driving event into coming with me when I go. The following is the advice I usually give them: Read the rest of this entry »
It seems like September is the month for breaking world speed records! First we had the record for the World’s Fastest Production Car broken at 255.83 MPH. Now the world speed record on a mountain bike has been broken, at 130.7 MPH!!!
As reported by Wired News, 33 year old Markus Stoeckl headed down a 45 degree, snowy slope in the Chilean Alps. Yes, that means he broke this record on snow. How he managed to stop at the end remains a mystery, and sources say he is unlikely to the world how he worked that particular piece of magic.
For those of you who haven’t been that fast, 130.7 MPH is REALLY fast. Thats right about the speed that my Miata tops out at. Actually, thats about the speed that most cars top out at. Hell, my Sentra probably won’t even go that fast! Now add that he’s doing it on bicycle tires with a colorful Darth Vader helmet on and I think you get the larger picture…
It is no secret that Noah and Clint are quicker with the camera than me. The car-carrier which smashed one of its cars into a bridge, the lovely moose spoiler, and the guy who drives around with his seatbelt dragging are all examples of the pictures they have taken of the the splendid failures of others. Well it kills me to see the ridiculing of others and not be a part, and I don’t have the patience to wait around for failure to happen. So, I decided to go onto YouTube and find the most unreasonable car video I could to share with everybody.
Well, as it turns out, if you are willing to follow the suggested links from each video deeper and deeper you get some pretty spectacular results. I had enough candidates that I’m going to try and make a habit of posting these over the next few weeks. So with that, I present YouTube Failure #1: Dancing Miata.
This video has a collection of factors which made it my first pick to highlight as a YouTube failure. Read the rest of this entry »
On Monday I stopped by NHIS to watch Tim track his CBR 954RR at an HPDE run by MotoMarket, a local bike shop that mostly sells riding gear. I know I would never feel comfortable participating after seeing the dangerously thin safety staff on hand, .
As far as I could tell, there were only 3 flaggers: One on the main straight, one in the treehouse, and one at 3/10. Take a look at the track map, courtesy of Trackpedia, for reference. I can’t say for sure that the stations in 1 and 2 were empty (these corners comprise the south chicane, which is to the right on the map, but I am sure that corner 3 (a dangerous low-speed corner with weird bumps) and corner 10, a dangerous downhill right that requires you to thread the car through two concrete walls, were covered by one person. Corner 3 probably features more spins than any other at NHIS. Corner 10 has fewer, but the ones it does have usually end with someone in the tire wall. At the track days I attend (run by the excellent Sports Car Driving Association), 3-4 people cover that area: Usually 2 in 10 and 1-2 in 3. The very safety-conscious SCCA puts 2-3 people at each corner and another at corner 4, which is just beyond the wall in the map.
You probably haven’t paid much heed to how you should be braking while already in a corner. After all, you just hit the brakes, right? At slower speeds where you are nowhere near the limits of the car, yes, just hitting the brakes can work out OK. But speed up even a little bit and those same inputs can cause your car to spin. The results can be disastrous and deadly.
The reason your car will spin if you brake while cornering is a combination of brake oversteer and throttle oversteer, which we covered in Indepth Oversteer: Different types of oversteer and how to correct them. The basic principle at work is weight transfer. When you lift off of the throttle, weight transfers forward to the front wheels. The same thing happens when you hit the brakes, just to an even greater extent.
So what does this mean? Well, any given tire will have more grip when more weight is applied to it, and less grip when less weight is applied to it. So, say you are taking a corner a neutral throttle at or close to the limit of grip. Now lets pretend you see a deer in the road and slam on the brakes, without changing the position of the steering wheel. You will shift much of your cars weight onto your front wheels, giving them more grip, and off of your rear wheels, giving them less grip. The result? Your front tires will have enough traction to both turn and brake, but your rear tires will not, and will begin to slide, putting you into a spin.
If you are accelerating through a corner and slam on the brakes, the effect is compounded. Now you have the weight transfer forward from lifting off of the throttle and from braking. You will spin.
So what are you supposed to do if you suddenly need to brake in a corner? The simple answer: slowly apply the brake as you slowly unwind the wheel. This will slowly transfer the rear tires from cornering grip to braking grip, as we discussed in The Friction Circle. I have this down to a reflex now. Whenever I hit the brakes in a corner, I unwind the wheel a little bit, just to ensure that the rears remain planted and don’t go for a mis-adventure. Read the rest of this entry »
Our discussion has primarily revolved around a text-book style Dry Line. But is there really only 1 best line around a race track? The short answer is no. That would be too easy, wouldn’t it?
Remember, The Line is the fastest way around a racetrack. Things such as car size, weight, power and setup, track conditions, and hazards on the track can all yield different optimal lines for different cars. As we have already discussed, driving in the rain or in a race are two examples where the best line differs from the classic Dry Line.
Rain, Oil, Immobile Cars, and Other Nasties
The most obvious case in which there is more than one optimal line is when something is on the regular line. If a car dumps all of its oil right at the apex, or even decides to inconveniently park itself at the apex temporarily or for the rest of the session, you probably want to avoid the apex. In this case of oil, hitting the apex and a regular speed will make you spin, and then you would be the one blocking the track. This is undesirable. You can either slow way down so that you are at the limit of traction when you hit the oil, or simply go around it. Oil is very slippery, and chances are that a line that bypasses it completely will yield a faster time overall.
As discussed in The Line, Part 9: The Rain Line, the best Line in the rain is often different from the best Line in the dry. There are 2 reasons for this, but both relate to traction. The first reason is that going off-Line can provide higher grip, often enough to make up for going off-Line in the first place. The second reason is that you lose about 50% of your cornering grip, but only about 30% of your braking and acceleration grip in the wet. This means you want to treat your car as though it were a muscle car, because that is what it has become. It is now a car that you tip-toe through the corners, and keep it accelerating in a straight line as much as possible.
The title of World’s Fastest Production Car has been handed off to a new king. Behold the Shelby Supercars Ultimate Aeron Twin Turbo:
As stated on Shelby’s website, the Ultimate Aeron successfully passed the Guiness Book of World Record’s stringent test on September 13. In the test, the car must drive down a stretch of road, turn around, and then drive back up the same stretch of road within 1 hour. The two top speeds are then averaged together. This is to eliminate any favorable or unfavorable road and weather conditions that might be found in one of the directions. The Ultimate Aeron managed 255.83 mph, beating out the current record holder, the Koenigsegg CCR, at 242 mph.
Dry weight is a light-for-this-type-of-car 2750 lbs. This is good, as light cars do everything better. Power is a mind-numbing 1183 horsepower from a twin turbocharged 6.3 liter V8.
For those of you who haven’t been all that fast in a car, let the record show that 255 mph is fast. REALLY REALLY fast. Granted, it probably takes 10 miles to reach that speed, but that is almost twice as fast as my Miata will go.
Price is as out to lunch as its top speed: $550,000. Thats cheaper than a jet, almost as fast, and definitely a lot more fun. Quite the bargain.
Jim Beam was trying to do a promotion in Portsmouth New Hampshire by giving rides in one of the few street-legal NASCARs around. Although the driver said he “always observes speed limits when off-track,” the local Police evidently took exception to something:
That’s quite the expression on the cop’s face! And yes, crawling out of the window is the preferred technique for getting out of that car.
He was cited for breaking a city ordinance banning “excessive noise.” It’s a good thing the cop didn’t hear it in its original race form!
Last week Clint showed us some pictures of the Carrera GT that showed up at Lime Rock for a track day. I’ll admit it, I’m pretty jealous I missed the chance to see it since the only time I’ve seen one in person was a showroom in Washington. However, whenever I read news about the Pagani Zonda I just forget about all these mundane cars. I can’t put my finger on any particular reason why I’m so much more excited about this car than other exotics but I guess we must allow ourselves some irrational passion every now and then. Are there any cars that you are overly excited about for no reason?
America offers some pretty amazing roads to those who look for them. But few come close to Stelvio Pass Road, in the Alps:
As reported by Fogonazos, the road is 2758 meters high (thats almost 9050 feet, for us Americans), has a 6100 foot elevation gain, and has 60 hairpin turns. It was originally designed to connect Lombardia with the rest of Austria, but now serves the likes of suicidal drivers and masochistic cyclists everywhere.
