[Autocross] Points Event #1 with TSCC : Apr 2023

Location: Virginia Motorsports Park

For 2023, I volunteered to help the Tidewater Sports Car Club with novice instruction at all the autocross events. It’s been about 5 years since my last autocross event, and figured it would help a lot with course recognition, evaluating changes with the car (prior to dumping $$ for a track weekend), and in general just get more comfortable with the car.

Since the last event at VIR, I actually started tuning the car myself via Simos Tools (check out the Simos Tools Users group on Facebook if you’re interested in learning more) and was now on my own tune. The benefit of doing it myself was taking advantage of the SwitchpaTCh Traction Control which does away with the OEM TC, and replaces it with about a dozen user-configurable parameters such as target slip rate, ignition pull rate, etc. There were no other changes to the car since VIR.

Temperatures were cold in the low 50s. The front sway bar definitely made the car push on the first run and a bit of the second. I was still not liking the V730s, though run 3 they started to “turn on” and the car felt GOOD. I was able to put it all together on run #5 to win the ST* class overall (TSCC runs all of the Street Touring classes together in a PAX bump class) 0.244 sec ahead of another friend in an STH MK7, and PAX #7/100 entries overall. I was quite happy with that.

Once up to temp the tires definitely felt better than they had at VIR a couple months prior, but they still did not have the “bite” that I had come to really like with the RT660 from last year. Tire wear seems to be pretty good though - that was one gripe with the RT660: fast edgewear.

The car needs [more] camber more than anything else next.