AUTOX: 2015 Autocross Solo Guide - Chapter 1: Goals

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2015 Autocross Solo Guide
Chapter 1: Goals

Chapter 1 - Introduction
All right folks!

Solo season fast approaches with a ton of races upcoming for the cars. This e-mail thread can be used as food for thought for autoxing/competing, driving techniques, etc. Obviously the Mini is a fwd car, but same basic principles apply... I say that but the one time I drove rwd last season I was terrible in it - more on that in the future.

First things first - SCCA memberships - get one if you aren't one already. You can wait until March but the sooner the better - you need it if you want to preregister on motorsportreg.com. Use ### as your reference when you do register for SCCA. If that's already taken care of, remember Geico gives discounts if you're an SCCA member..

Goals - we should talk about goals first. I think we all have roughly the same idea in mind as far as what we want out of autoxing for now - maybe not be the best, but get pretty darn good regionally. St Louis, as well as most regions, rank drivers by index -  a made up number to somehow take the car out of the equation based on a lot of fuzzy math etc etc. The key takeaway from this is that it is a very very good year for most stock classes (save for GS & HS) which got a huge drop in index. ES, for example, went from 0.814 to 0.808. This means that last year, if you had run 45s flat, your index time would be 36.63 - this year, running 45s puts you at 36.36 - boom, you just went 3 tenths quicker without improving at all. The flip side of this is that other stock classes have similar gains. 

Anyway, the goal here really is to get within 3-4s of the #1 index driver - his name will be Doctor. Novices last year breached into the top 20, but after the index adjustments this year I don't see it happening too much. 3-4s behind index will usually put you anywhere from 25-30 to 35-40 overall, depending who's there. Your goal will be to get under Top 30, and your goal is to be novice champion, 1st and 2nd. I think these are fairly reasonable goals, but keep in mind everyone is shooting for the same thing - so it won't be easy. You might not hit any of these goals until the last few events.

Goals: Top 30, within 3s index of #1 driver, novice champion.

Next chapter: Car prep, General & Event