June Autocross Report

Hello, is this thing on?

The Metro NY Region of the Porsche Club of America returned to autocross action at the Nassau Coliseum on June 13th, and NMS can report that the #77 Cayman enjoyed a perfect day weather wise! Driving wise, my goal remains to finish in the top 10 for the year on PAX time, and while we're waiting for the official results, it looks like 5th or 6th on the day for NMS, so that should keep me right in the top 10 for now. 

This classic Porsche 911 in orange was very, very nice!

There were a few challenges with the timing software, so instead of 10 runs as planned, each driver ended up with only 8, but that's still plenty of driving. For me personally, I had 3 runs where the timing was off, so I was lucky enough to get 3 additional re-runs, giving me 11 times to drive the course. While some autocross courses are pretty short, say 40 seconds or even less, today was really fun because it was over a minute on every run. I believe the FTD, or Fastest Time of the Day was a Porsche 911 Turbo S in 61.458 seconds.

FIAT Abarth 124 Spider
Pretty sure this was the fastest Italian of the day
Pretty sure it was the only Italian car of the day!

 My best time was a bit slower than that, but at 65.081, I think I made some good improvements with my driving, as well as experimenting with some lower tire pressures in an effort to use more tire. This left me less than a second behind the very quick driver in a another 09 Cayman that won our class. My car says to start with cold pressures of 30 front and 31 rear, and that's pretty much what I've done in the past 11 months of driving it. However, I noticed that I had not been seeing any wear down the side of the tire to the little triangle that shows you how much tread you can use. Guided by that info, I drove the morning 5 runs at about 28 front and 29, and then in the afternoon lowered it about two more pounds, and that gave me my best times. 

Volvo
Also fastest Swedish car of the day
And only Swedish car of the day

I was also happy that my final three runs were very consistent, as in 65.081, 65.099, and a final run of 64.843. Unfortunately that last run also included a DNF on the scoring system, so somewhere I must have missed a cone, but for the life of me I don't know where. Maybe I can review my in-car video and spot it, but I'm thinking my camera wasn't on for the last run too! Oh well. Instead of worrying about all the small things, and the "coulda-woulda-shoulda" factors that might have had me drive faster, it was a fun day chock full of driving, great weather 75 and sunny, and then cloudy with a breeze, and about 68 drivers. 

Porsche Boxster