Professional Driver on Closed Road
and asked "Why does that guy get to have all the fun?"
Have you ever said
"I wish I could drive on a closed road like that".
Autocross makes driving your car more fun than just zipping over to the grocery store for a box of oat bran.
Notice the body lean of Brian Flanagan's (Chattanooga, TN) Mazda RX-7 as it works its way through the course at the 1995 Yokohama Southeast Division Solo II? SCCA Solo II autocross events give you a chance to drive your car the way the engineers intended it to be driven, exploring its limits in the controlled environment of a miniature road course marked with traffic cones.
You can get a driver's eye view by looking at the large (1.5 Mb) MPEG movie that Mark Bradakis has on his amusing home page and on the Team.Net autocross page, or read what Lloyd Loring has to say about what it's like to drive in Solo II.
You can join in the fun at our monthly Regional competitions, or one in the SCCA region near where you live. Our events are held on an abandoned long-term parking lot at the old Tallahassee airport terminal. Locally we have people driving everything from beautifully-restored classic sports cars to pickup trucks. If it is safe to drive, there is a class for you to run it in.
You can also experience the fun of autocross competition by coming out and getting involved by helping with timing and scoring, or as a corner worker. If you are a fan of auto racing, you will appreciate it much more after getting involved at the grassroots level of SCCA Solo II or Solo I.
Autocross is a timed competition, not a race.
One car at a time (Solo) runs against the clock on a course that is defined by orange traffic cones in much the same way that flags are used to set gates in ski racing. The course is set on an open parking lot, sometimes an airstrip, so the cones are the only obstacle you need to worry about. No traffic; no excuses. There is a two second penalty added to your time for each cone you knock over.
The skill and precision required to be the winning car around a pylon-marked course is the same as on any racing circuit. The difference is that the rules for all SCCA Solo Events are designed to avoid any wheel-to-wheel racing so as to minimize the chance of damage to cars and drivers.
A Solo II course is designed with the safety of novice drivers in mind, so speeds stay within the normal legal range: the fastest stock car should not get over 55-65 mph at any time. On the lot used by the Dixie Region, a stock car like the Miata usually won't get out of second gear; cars with lower gear ratios will spend some time in third.
This may sound tame, but when you are driving on the street you don't find yourself approaching a one-lane-wide 90-degree corner or a 3-lane-wide 180-degree U-turn at redline in second gear (60 mph), wondering exactly how late you can brake and still make the turn.
Don't take risks out there with curbs and trees and other cars around, where being at the wrong speed for a particular situation can be fatal. If you want to explore the limits of your car, do it safely, not recklessly. At an autocross you will learn to control the cornering forces encountered in driving and enjoy your car's full potential in the safest possible environment.
A closed-course environment allows you to focus on driving. The observations on what it's like to drive in Solo II from Lloyd Loring of the South Bend Region are pretty accurate.
If you have never seen an autocross or heard of it, you may have additional questions. In particular, I have some suggestions if you are coming out to run for the first time. Autocross is much harder than it looks, and it is quite easy to have a bad experience if you think you can just drop by in your hot car and turn the Fastest Time of the Day. I was lucky to have some really good advice at my first event, and I will gladly help pass that information on to others interested in this sport.
Last updated circa August 2000 by Jim Carr, who autocrosses his Miata in C Stock.