2000 Special Edition #2441

[lifebyevan]

April 25th, 2021

I signed up for a local autocross event in pursuit of some much-needed seat time. This was my first autocross event despite owning a Miata for several years. I was unbelievably excited to finally give autocross a try first hand. I did a once-over with the car the night before the event. I gave the brakes a quick bleed, since I put a few thousand street miles on the fluid, just to be safe. Checked the oil level, looked for any leaks, snugged up all the clamps, packed some basic tools and a bunch of snacks for the day ahead of me.

I was placed in the Novice class for obvious reasons. I walked the course layout three times with my friend who was an experienced autocrosser, who happily gave me a few tips and tricks along the way. The most important thing I was focused on was looking ahead as they say. Autocross can be quite confusing to some with all the cones, and it’s easy to get lost in “the sea of cones”, so the best thing to prevent this is to look as far ahead beyond the element you are about to pass through. Here is a picture of the course layout for the day:



I spent my first two runs with my experienced friend who helped me along the way and gave me feedback after each run. The first run was exploratory and the second I picked up the pace. Third and fourth runs I ran solo. I did a bit worse by myself. I was a bit too aggressive with my inputs, not taking the cleanest line, and also locked up my fronts a couple of times braking too late. At this point, I was learning that with my setup my car had a heavy bias to understeer in the corners. This was mainly because in the recent past I did a tire rotation, putting the much more worn rear tires in the front and vice versa. Pretty sure the previous owner(s) did not rotate the tires very often because there was a significant difference of tread from the front and rear. Nonetheless, the event continued. For my fifth and final run, I focused on being a bit more smooth with my inputs (mainly the brakes) so as to not upset the balance of the car as much. The fifth run was my cleanest of my runs. On my first run, I did a 35.6-second run and by my fifth run, I managed to finish with a time of 34.4.









We finished the event a little ahead of schedule so we had time for some “fun runs”, which are not recorded for the results posted online but still timed. At the start of the fun runs, I had a really experienced Miata autocrosser drive my car with me in it to show me what it was capable of. He put down a much quicker time of 32.4 with my car. Once I got back into the driver’s seat, I was able to lower my time to a 34.1, and the following run I was able to do a 33.8, which was over half a second better than my best during competition. What really made the difference on those fun runs was being able to clean up my line and be a bit more smooth with my inputs.

I had a friend record most of my runs from the sidelines that I made into a small video for Youtube. The video starts off with my 3rd and 4th runs where I drove with no instructor for the first time. I hit a couple of cones on my first time out solo. The next two clips are from when I was driving during the fun runs.



One thing I was battling with besides the understeer was locking up the fronts because I don’t have ABS. Having no ABS will be a learning curve, but hopefully, I can do my best to learn on my stock wheel and tire set up that way I don’t flat spot a set of nicer, softer compound tires. I really enjoyed how much I learned as a driver in such a short timeframe by going to an autocross event. I do plan on attending a few more events and working on my driving skills before going to a track day. Compared to a track day, autocross seems to be significantly less strain on the car and it is a lot less expensive.