It’s been way too long since I’ve driven a car in anger, this past weekend offered the first real opportunity for me to get out and see how bad I am now. Driving is a muscle, the more you exercise it the better it gets; but also, if you don’t it will atrophy.
Ending the suspense early, I did manage a podium. Manage being a key word. The day started off pretty rough (as you would expect). Over the course of the day, I dropped 10 seconds off my time. That’s a crazy amount of time. The first couple runs, everything was moving faster than I wanted and I was over driving. Eli jumped in the car to get a view of the track and after it was over reminded me to slow down and be smooth. After that, the time started dropping a lot.
Barber Motorsport’s Proving Ground is a fantastic site for these events. It offers a great mix of some predefined elements that can be used in different ways, along with a wide open area that allows for some of the more traditional autocross elements. This course was fast, flowing and fun:
Cold and damp conditions combined with over-driving did make for some fun moments. The best was on my very first run, going into the 180 the back-end stepped out and made for a fun FWD drift moment, albeit unintentional.
Kim Bailey and Spark Creative captured the opposite lock slide:
This event also gave me to the opportunity to try out the new features in the RaceBox app. The biggest new feature that has been added to the app is the ability to sync video and output the video with the data overlay. I was fighting with my Go-Pro, and didn’t get it connected. So RaceBox was limited to my camera on my phone. This helps to add the missing information when reviewing the data. RaceBox has a very fine level of GPS data that allows you to compare lines lap over lap, but sometimes you need to see the perspective from in the car and understand the inputs you are providing to the car to help understand where to improve.
The video can be stored on the device and now RaceBox supports uploading the session and video to their cloud storage so that it can be reviewed on other devices. Here’s a look at the my 2 best runs as recorded by my phone:
My 7th run ended up being my fastest. My last run started out faster, but I over-drove the car is a couple spots and cost myself time. I’ll keep working to get the rust off and remember how to drive again. Looking forward to more driving this year, less sitting around with a boot on my foot. Also need to work on my technical setup. I should be able to pull inputs from the car and the Go-Pro video into a single feed.
Here’s the other videos and pictures from the event:
