After I set my 30 by 30 Travel Challenge goal, I also decided to finally do one of the things that I always wanted to do: Motorsports. I always perceived there to be three major roadblocks, though:
- I still owed a bank for my current daily driver
- It’s expensive, right?
- Where do I start?
I self-imposed the first roadblock on myself: I didn’t want to put my car at risk while a bank still owned it. The second I found to be only as true as you want it to be. The last one was a tougher nut to crack in isolation, however. That is, until a friend of mine asked to stay on my couch one night.
The Beginning
A friend of mine, Pete, was on my side of town one Saturday night. Over sushi, he mentioned some event he was going to in the morning. Pete and I are very similar: engineer + gear head with an addiction for cars, especially of the project kind. At the time, he had a Mazdaspeed 3 just like myself, albeit modified. Nowadays his project car, Hazmat, has its own Grassroots Motorsports Thread. Since it was getting late, I offered my couch and he started elaborating on the event:
It was an autocross with the Lone Star Region Porsche Club of America (PCA). Autocross is an entry-level type of event where they set up a bunch of cones on a large slab of concrete into a makeshift road course. It is tight, technical, and different every event. Each car has the course to themselves, and goes out for individual “runs” in quick succession.
Addressing Concerns
Then Pete started addressing all of my concerns:
1) The bank owned my car, wasn’t this going to put my car at risk? No. The entire course is set up to be done within a single gear (usually 2nd). This equates to the fastest cars / courses at most hitting 60mph. To add to that, we’re surrounded by flat tarmac and simply cones. Worst case, you spin out, hit a few cones and get some eraser marks on your paint that will rub off.
2) Isn’t everything in motorsports expensive? No, it’s as expensive as you want to make it. This specific event was on the expensive side, since it was a smaller event. This one day event cost $80. It’s usually pretty cheap to rent open tarmac…
3) Where do I start? Pete explained this really simply: Just come with me tomorrow, and I can show you the world… (Do I have to pay someone to use those words?)
My First Autocross
Like most motorsports events, they often start early in the morning. We woke our cars up and traveled up to the common Houston autocross venue: the Houston Police Academy (yikes!).
Prep
To prep the car, you have to ensure all lose items are removed. In addition, it’s usually a good idea to remove all the excess heavy items from the car that may be bolted down, since they just add weight.
After putting makeshift numbers on the car with some painters tape, we were ready to go. Note, I now use FrogTape for all my temporary numbers since it’s contrasting with any blue car.
Seth + The Track Walk
Once you’re done with prep, you get a chance to walk the course to get a feel for where all the braking, turn-in point and apexes were. This is where I met Seth, in charge of taking us rookies out on that track walk. Little did I know, but Seth would end up being my instructor in-car, in addition to being a long-time friend in the future.
As an aside, Seth has quite the variety of car experiences he writes about over at Grassroots Motorsports. Everything from the Traccord, a Honda Accord grocery-getter turned track car; to his Everest, a Mercedes R63 AMG that turned into a (nearly) $57k nightmare.
The First Run
Anyway, when it’s your time to run, you line up in grid and wait as they release you one by one. Seth joined me in the car after another student ran, and my heart started pounding. We inched closer to the starting line, waiting to be released… Why was it pounding that much for what would be only 60 seconds?
Then I was a bat out of hell.
60… 61… 6… 69 seconds later it was all over. I was not as fast the first time as I felt. However, I survived and no cones were hurt in the making of the run. All I wanted to do was do it all over again. I was hooked.