Notes from autocrossing this weekend!
First and most importantly - great fun was had and nothing got broken. Having not done much performance driving, and never really having driven a RWD or MR car before, it was sure an educational experience. Braking in turns = bad. My brain knew that, but my foot had to learn. Oops.
Car-specific stuff:
-Knocked my knee against the key on my first pass through the slalom, turning it to ACC. May be going through the pushbutton start thread for inspiration later - moving my foot farther forward was a fine solution for the day though.
-After a couple hot laps Friday night, I tightened up the front springs several turns and clicked in about half the shocks. That seemed to work great during Sunday's autocross.
-The "manumatic" worked great. Definitely the weak point of the system is the hard 1-2 shift. So after the first run, I ended up just starting in 2nd and leaving it alone for the whole course. On the last run of the day, I turned on the TCC and lopped about 3s off my time. Made the acceleration feel a lot more immediate, so I don't think it was all attributable to improving technique. There's a line pressure adjustment input for the system that I'm not currently using, and that may be something to explore in the future, along with steering wheel-mounted shift inputs.
-Countersteering is a real challenge with a little over 3 turns lock-to-lock on the Cobalt rack. Once the rear end lets loose, it's pretty difficult to pull yourself back together. If anyone can suggest a quicker rack that would work, I'm all ears. A friend drives a Focus ST that has something like 2 turns lock-to-lock, but that seems like it'd require quite a bit of machining to make it work. Will be researching this for sure though.
-That said, tires were definitely the weak point on this particular car. Dates are longer ago than I'd care to admit (just using the tires that were on the RPF1's when I bought them) and my Rival-S's won't be here for a couple weeks yet. Looking forward to getting more grip though.
-Since it's so small, finding the car in grid could be a challenge. Fortunately, I was generally able to locate it by looking near small crowds.
All in all, my only regret is that the next local autocross I'll be able to actually make isn't until July. I guess that just means I have more time to tinker and tune until then.