Mindsets in Autocross

During a recent Atlanta SCCA autocross event, I personally accounted for over 40% of my 6-person class’s cone hits. This also earns me the distinction of being tied for most cone hits across the event. Either my car has a finely tuned cone magnet hidden in its front bumper or I am in need of some improvement to my driving style.

But identifying a problem and solving it are two very different things. To find a solution, first I must find, or at least speculate on, the reason that my car’s diet is unusually high in thermoplastic. The main areas of note are vision and expectation. More specifically, misjudging the distance to cones and misunderstanding the handling characteristics of the car respectively.

Without data (a camera would help immensely), it’s hard to know how much of each is causing me problems. At very rough guess though, I’d say that about half of the cones I hit come as a surprise, so vision exercises are certainly in order. A quick fix would be to focus on driving further from all cones, though this will come at the expense of overall time. It also may take more effort than is immediately obvious, as passing information from one’s concious mind to one’s subconcious “driving program” (paraphrasing Ross Bentley) can be a difficult task. During the last event I noted that visualization techniques seemed to help trigger actions during those cruicial 60-ish seconds of action.

Expanding on the visualization techniques, we can get as specific as we’d like with them. During the next event, I will spend time visualizing driving past each cone without hitting it, making sure to look where I want to go (next to the cone, not through it). I will also visualize looking toward the next element at each stage of the corner - braking, turn-in, apex, and exit. I believe that these visualization techniques should help develop habits especially with vision.

On the handling side, one thing that may help is working up to the limit rather than starting out on it. Taking the first run as almost a parade lap, making note of any differences from my expectations during course walk could be a first step. This requires creation of a second “program”. The time before the first run should be spent visualizing a clean run.

The key takeaway here is that early runs should trade overall speed for a reduction in risk and an increase in course knowledge. While a fast first run may look impressive, it’s no match for a competitor’s third run if they spent the first two identifying marks. And having a clean run in the books allows more risk in later runs, where one can try new things.