This was the third race in the Cactus Patch series and the event which finally gave me the footing needed to just about secure a first place finish in the points standings. The weather was great and we had nearly 140 people show up to race! According to the SCCA guys, that was the most people that have shown up for a single event in several years.

The course layout was very nice and took full advantage of the addtional square footage offered by the EFA facility over previous sites. There was both a long high speed portion with sweeping turns and then a tight highly technical section. The courses are also much longer than could be done with the Firebird skidpad. Where some of the Firebird courses were 38-45 seconds, this most recent track was 57-72 seconds for most cars.

The first real turn, at the end of the sweeper after the start proved to be quite a handful for most everyone that doesn't have ABS. Because the turn didn't give much of any room to brake in a straight line, you had to either give lots of room for gentle braking before bending in to the turn, or you had to come down hard on the brakes and risk the back end coming around. Since even my Civic was getting up to around 50 at the end of the sweeper, there was a lot of speed that had to come off before making the tight 180 degree turn.

On my first run out, I drove extremely deep and braked very hard in to the turn. I'd gotten my car to oversteer under braking before, so I was pretty sure I knew what I was doing. However, coming down to just about full brake when you're already doing about max lateral force doesn't work quite right if you intended for the rear wheels to follow the fronts.

So just about a fraction of a second after I hit the brakes the back end was rotating a bit more quickly than the front and I had to let a bit of the steering out. Unfortunately, I was still real hot in to the turn and had to stay hard on the brake if I didn't want to blow through the cones at the back of the turn. After about 90 degrees of rotation and maybe .3 second, I'm now turning so the wheels are pointed to the left and still rotating to the right very rapidly. In the blink of an eye, I've completed the 180 degree turn and am facing the right direction at the moment the rear wheels finally decide they'd like to go the same direction as the fronts. Talk about a rush! I'm not sure if I've really gotten good enough at autocrossing to say that was skill or if it was absolutely pure luck that I didn't spin wildly out of control or off the racing line. Either way, that's what I got into this sport for and it's what keeps me coming back for more.

The next turn also gave a little opportunity to get the back end light, but oversteer here would put you way off the racing line. The rest of the course was what I would term more "typical" of the tight transitions I'm starting to get used to with autocross courses. This track really did a lot to boost my confidence and once again I was able to post an improvement of my PAX% over the previous event.

HS Open Entries: 6. Total entries in event: 137

Pos	Driver	Car	Fast Time	FT%	PAX Time	PAX%
1	Brandon Smith	Honda Civic HX	65.652	846	51.537	910
2	Scot Banks	Audi 4000 Quattro	66.071	841	51.866	905
3	Alex Towner	Audi 4000 Quattro	68.241	814	53.569	876
4	Heidi Kmetz	94 Saturn SL1	68.452	811	53.735	873
5	Greg Schupfer	65 Corvair	68.970	805	54.141	867
6	Ginger Schupfer	65 Corvair	74.573	745	58.540	802

Although I didn't know it at first, apparently Scot Banks, driving the Audi 4000 seen in second place here, used to race a VW Rabbit regularly with the AZ Region. So it would seem I somehow managed to scurry my Honda around to a win against pretty tough competition once again. This time, I won by only 0.42 second! That's only a about a half a percentage point of difference in times. Heidi was having trouble finding a good line on this track, plus the very long straights in between the first few turns put her 85hp Saturn at a real disadvantage.

Greg Schupfer however managed to turn some pretty amazing times in his street tire 1966 Corvair finishing only about a half-second behind Heidi's top time. His diligence and abilities paid off in the end, and he was able to finish the Cactus Patch series a few points ahead of the always-tough Heidi.

I think I'm starting to sound like a broken record here, but I managed to top all the HS entries regardless of class again at this event. This time we had a total of 12 cars which were HS running in different classes such as Open, Novice, and Street Tire. Again, Scot Banks and Alex Towner in the Audi 4000 were closest, with Heidi and Greg closely behind them. So it looks like the Open category had about the best times as a group at this event. I don't really know any of the other HS drivers listed here, but it's good to see such a large group of people competing in their daily drivers. That's part of what this sport exists for, after all, to give everyone a chance to go out and race whatever they've got.

All HS entries regardless of class: 12

Pos	Driver	Car	Fast Time	FT%	PAX Time	PAX%
1	Brandon Smith	Honda Civic HX	65.652	846	51.537	910
2	Scot Banks	Audi 4000 Quattro	66.071	841	51.866	905
3	Alex Towner	Audi 4000 Quattro	68.241	814	53.569	876
4	Heidi Kmetz	94 Saturn SL1	68.452	811	53.735	873
5	Greg Schupfer	65 Corvair	68.970	805	54.141	867
6	Brian Dolan	94 Jetta	69.676	797	54.696	858
7	Jeff Laverty	Mustang	69.713	797	54.725	857
8	Chris Oliver	90 Plymouth Laser	72.184	769	56.664	828
9	Mark Aksamit	66 Corvair	73.260	758	57.509	816
10	Ginger Schupfer	65 Corvair	74.573	745	58.540	802
11	Bruce Begley	Fiat 128 Rally	74.695	743	58.636	800
12	Michael Brieke	92 Ford Escort	77.448	717	60.797	772

I improved upon my PAX% once again at this event. The PAX% is a number representing how close you came to the fastest time of the day, regardless of who set that time, or what class they ran in. It's a good way to gauge your progress, and for this event, I was able to improve my PAX% from 902 in the previous event to 910 at this event. Although I don't think I'll be doing a full analysis of the May 2nd event, it's worth noting that my PAX% was 922 for that event, which was once again the highest PAX% of any HS car.

Points standings after 4 of 4 events
Position	Driver	Feb	Mar	Apr	May	Total
1	Brandon Smith	882	902	910	922	2734
2	Greg Schupfer	857	-	867	871	2595
3	Heidi Kmetz	856	853	873	854	2583
4	Ginger Schupfer	830	-	802	842	2474

Since I don't think I'll be putting the May analysis online, I have gone ahead and put the points totals for the whole series here. The total represents each competitor's best 3 of 4 events. I managed to take first place in points, which won't come as a great surprise to any of you who've been following my progress on my web page already.

Although I could easily stay in HS Open for another season, it is with a heavy heart that I report Heidi Kmetz will no longer be competing in the AZ Region Solo2 events. In fact, she's moving out of the state entirely! While I'm sure Greg will happily go head to head with me anyway, I'm not sure that's entirely fair, so I'll almost certainly be trying my hand in the Street Tire 2 class for the fall season. There's a lot more cars in that category, plus it includes cars from a lot of different classes so times are sorted by the weighted PAX%. Since there's typically about 15 cars in that category, my goal is to be in the top 3. The first race of the Fall season is going to be September 12th, but I'll be at a stand-alone event on June 5th, as well as an Open Track in California on June 12th. So stay tuned to Autocrossing.com for more great racing stories!

For additional event information and signup forms, see the Arizona Region SCCA web site. If you'd like to see the complete event results for any of the races in the spring series, you can use the Results tool I wrote which has the complete results for all the races of 1999.

Page created: 5-25-99
This site maintained by Brandon Smith
Some text and information from results as posted by the Arizona Region SCCA.
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