In a ritual that's getting all-too familiar, I set out to find this month's new autocrossing site with only a vague idea of where I was going. Yes, we were at yet another new site for this race. This time the site was Exponent Failure Analysis in far north Phoenix. It was another two or three miles north of the last site, so now my commute to the race track is around 40 miles or so. Not exactly what I wanted, but certainly not enough to prevent me from showing up and participating in this great sport, even at 7:30am.

The main disappointment for me was learning that no photographic equipment is allowed at this site. You may have already seen my rants on this earlier and I'm afraid it's true. Being an amateur photographer and wishing to have flashy and exciting pictures for the web site, this does not sit well with me. So, it's a long drive and I can't take any pictures. But could it get worse?

Well, yes, but not unreasonably. We only got three runs per group instead of four. Also, entry fees were raised starting at this event. It's now $25 to sign-up on site, $20 if you pre-register, and time-onlys are up to $15 for four runs. So it's a hike of $5, which still isn't too bad, especially since I plan on pre-registering for future events. Fortunately, this was the end of any bad news for this event.

Upon arriving on-site after the somewhat long drive, I was pleasantly surprised to learn that Exponent Failure Analysis has a real skidpad, not just a big parking lot. Apparently they test cars for insurance companies or something so they actually have a track and skidpad of their own. I still don't understand what the deal is with the no cameras policy, since all there was to see is some junked cars. Big deal. All it makes me wonder is what the car manufacturers and insurance companies are doing here and hiding from us the consumers.

The skidpad is a bit larger than the Firebird site, but I'm not sure by how much since I'm terrible at estimating square footage of this scale. What it did provide us with though was a relatively fast track that was still technical in several of the turns, and took 50-60 seconds to complete for many of the entrants. I could just be fixated on numbers, but to me, any course worth it's salt should take at least 45 seconds for a fast street car, so this track met that goal while still having a number of segments where the faster cars could reach speeds in the upper 60's or so.

I don't know who does the course maps now, but they're not very representative of what the actual track layout really is, and they are a far cry from showing where the actual cone placement is. Still, the map here should give you something of an idea of what the track was like. Since I'm on a serious time budget here, I've got to hurry up and get to the meat of the story here.

I was up in the first run group of the day so my group got to find out if the skidpad surface was any good, or if we'd be slipping and sliding all over the place. There are a number of substantial cracks in the surface which are at least a half to three-quarters of an inch wide, but overall the surface was relatively clean and in good shape.

I did ok on my first run, but it was nothing to be proud of, and I knew I had several areas where I could have done better. The first run is usually like that though. Next run out, I actually do very well. No major mistakes, just a few areas where I slid too wide and had to scrub off speed to get back on line. On the third run I was doing great. Knowing we were only getting three runs and this was my last, I made an effort not to over-drive it and make any mistakes. So, coming up to the last turn, I felt like this must be at least a second quicker than the previous run.

The only problem was the final turn was a blind 180 turn. This means, there's just an apex set of cones on the inside, but no cones anywhere around the outside to help guide you through it. I suppose this is supposed to separate the truly great from those who are simply OK, and that's what it did. I misjudged my braking point and came around about three feet wider than planned. The result? I had to stop totally, back up, and then go foreword another 20 feet to trip the finish lights. Grrr.

So my second run wound up as my fastest. Would it be enough? Could I survive on a run that was very good, but not truly up to what I felt I should have been able to do? Well, here are the official results showed up in the mail, correcting one mistake I had for Greg's fast time. He actually had a 57.397, not a 57.551, so he's running second place in the event now.

HS Open Entries: 4. Total entries in event: 109

Pos	Driver	Car	Fast Time	FT%	PAX Time	PAX%
1	Brandon Smith	Honda Civic HX	55.761	824	43.772	882
2	Greg Schupfer	64 Corvair	57.397	801	45.057	857
3	Heidi Kmetz	94 Saturn	57.422	801	45.076	856
4	Ginger Schupfer	64 Corvair	59.254	776	46.514	830

So, it looks like all my mental practice and walking the course many times before the event and visualizing racing the track before actually racing paid off! Just for the record, according to the scoring board, Heidi actually ran a 55.721 on her third run which would have fractionally beat me, but it said she hit three cones. Possibly she did the same thing as me but rather than stop and backing up, she just mowed down all the cones at the finish.

Now, what you might be wondering is why there's four columns here just to describe how fast we went. I'll attempt to describe. The first, "Fast Time" is your actual, raw time it took to complete a lap. It's actually your best lap out of all your attempts, which in this event was best of three laps. The FT% is what percentage of the fastest raw time of the day you got. At this event, the fastest raw time was a 45.974 set by Mark Huffman in an ASP Lotus Elan. Since my raw time was 55.761, you do: (45.974 / 55.761 = .8244) which really means that the Lotus ran in 82.4% of how long it took me to finish. So, that's kind of confusing, but that's how it is.

The next is your PAX time. Very soon I will actually put a copy of the PAX table on my web site and provide links to various other sites explaining how it works. But briefly, the PAX conversion is a table that is supposed to equalize all cars. This way, you can (supposedly) compare the time of a Porsche 911 to my Civic by multiplying our raw times by the magic PAX number and that's how we would compare if we'd both been driving the same kind of cars. Unfortunately, most of the fast guys have competition tires, and a lot of people like me have ordinary street tires, which are no where near as grippy as the comp tires. Thus, it gets a little harder to compare cars in this way.

So basically, the PAX time would let me, say, compare my Civic's time to that of other Honda cars, even if they're in other classes. The PAX% is just like the FT%, except that it's based on the PAX times instead of raw times. Top PAX time was set by Marc McCombs in a GS Camaro V6, with a PAX time of 38.596. His raw time was 48.980, which shows how much a boost the PAX table can give you since that Lotus has a PAX time of 39.170.

Ok, so enough of that. Lets put up the table of how all the HS cars did, regardless of what class they entered. None of this counts for trophies or anything, but since they're all HS cars, they could become my competition at any time if they wanted to run in Open. Kind of like, Fantasy Autocrossing or something. Er, well, something like that.

All HS entries regardless of class: 8

Pos	Driver	Car	Fast Time	FT%	PAX Time	PAX%
1	Brandon Smith	Honda Civic HX	55.761	824	43.772	882
2	Brian Dolan	94 Jetta	56.158	819	44.084	876
3	Greg Schupfer	64 Corvair	57.397	801	45.057	857
4	Heidi Kmetz	94 Saturn	57.422	801	45.076	856
5	Warren Schluter	Ford Taurus	57.701	797	45.295	852
6	Jeff Laverty	90 Mustang	58.938	780	46.266	834
7	Ginger Schupfer	64 Corvair	59.254	776	46.514	830
8	Chris Oliver	Plymouth Laser	59.910	767	47.029	821

What they did stop doing now, which they used to report, was your actual place among all the entrants for both raw and PAX time. So, I decided to go through and identify how many cars actually ran quicker than me in PAX times, since raw times are pretty sad in my case. For this event, I took 58th out of 109 cars, which puts me in the 47th percentile. Dang! Just missed the upper half by about a half second or so.

So, my goal for the rest of the races in this series (outside of my attempt to win in my class) is to finish in the upper half of PAX times and to have a PAX% of 900 or better. Can I do it? Hopefully, but the only way to find out is by pressing myself to actually achieve these goals through determination, focus, and skillful excecution of my driving abilities. If that doesn't work, I'm just gonna buy those stinking full race tires.

Points standings after 1 of 4 events
Position	Driver	Points
1	Brandon Smith	882
2	Greg Schupfer	857
3	Heidi Kmetz	856
4	Ginger Schupfer	830

So to wrap things up, here's how the points standings look for the spring "Cactus Patch" series. There's 4 events, and I'm currently in the points lead, but not by much. Also, only your three highest point-gathering events count towards the series standings, so if all of the class gets over 882 points in the three remaining events, my win here is pretty irrelevant. I plan to do a feature soon about the advantages and disadvantages of the PAX system for the series. Stay tuned, as the next event is but one week from this writing.

For the complete results, entry forms, rules, etc, see the Arizona Region SCCA web site.

Page last updated 2-28-99
This site maintained by Brandon Smith
Some text and information from results as posted by the Arizona Region SCCA.