Thread: NYC Area auto-x
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Old 04-18-2011, 08:34 AM   #14
JST
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Join Date: Oct 2003
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Quote:
Originally Posted by equ View Post
The drive time to total time ratio is one thing, but that wasn't even the worst of it for me. The driving itself felt contrived to me. If cones were on both sides of the course, it might have helped. But without that to work with, there's a different skill to be developed to visualize a "course", then a driving line through that course and then finally control the car. Without the first, you don't even get to second and third. You could argue that my split between steps 1-2 are arbitrary, and perhaps it is. Either way, I wasn't particularly motivated by this step.
It's interesting you say this--one of the things that really bugged me about the "autocross" portion of the Porsche Driving School was that they used about 1 thousand cones to mark the course, every 4 feet or so on each side, all the way around. You'd think this would be easier, but it's actually much harder--the typical autocross course layout with a few dozen "gate" cones turns out to be a lot easier to use for visualization, at least for me. Too many cones increases the signal to noise ratio and makes it harder to concentrate on which cones actually are important.

As for the time/discomfort associated with autocrossing, that I really can't defend. And I'll agree that after trying the track, the actual driving part of autocrossing is not as thrilling for me, though you can do a lot of things with the limit of adhesion on the autocross course that you would never want to do on a track.
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