It’s warm and sunny out so our attention is turning to real cars!
This past weekend, my buddy Ken thought we should go do an autocross together, an autocross where I had no organizational responsibility, something we’ve never done.
So we did, we hit Event 2 of the Peterborough Motor Sports Club’s 2019 series at Kawartha Downs Speedway, a short paved oval on the inside of a horse racing track. The venue is an interesting one with banking, walls, and usual narrowness associated with tracks and runways, which equals a lot of slalom like elements, my favs.
The weather was perfect and the turn-out was decent despite multiple competing events in the area that day. There were some wet patches and puddles in the in-field at the outset owing to the deluge of the night before, but for the most part the track was dry.
Ken and I started on cone duty, but only had to replace a few cones as the course didn’t seem to provoke cone hits. The proximity of the concrete also ensure that everyone keeps it under control, truth be told.
The course featured a pin cone at one end and drivers could choose either a clockwise, or a counter-clockwise path. We watched our competitors try both and it wasn’t entirely clear which would be faster. After three runs, it was our turn to give it a shot.
Ken was first and we rode shotgun with one another for our first two runs before going solo for our third. Our times tumbled quickly and we were nearly cone-free, but the one we did hit got lodged firmly under Ruby’s front subframe, necessitating the use of a jack to extract it.
Ken did great finding hunks of time across the three runs, but this one element kept catching him out (see tail end of above video). I figure with two to three more runs he would have nailed it and stopped losing time there.
Given the travel time back to Kingston (for Ken) and Ottawa (for me), we elected to call it a day after having completed one cycle of cone duty and runs, so we don’t know where we ended up in the standings, but at the time of departure, I was sitting second in RAW time, a tenth off a gorgeous, black FD RX-7.
That RX-7 was the second nicest car there. Ruby, Ken’s 2004 MSM, takes that prize in my book. Driving her reminded me how awesome MSMs are and how much I miss mine. Despite doing this type of thing for a decade now, Ruby still had me shaking with adrenaline after each of my runs. Thanks to both Ken and Ruby for letting me sit in. And thanks as well to the PMSC organizers and competitors who ran a great event and made interlopers like us feel welcome.