Sunday, July 10, 2005

Grand Forks SCCA Autocross


So I autocrossed my 2000 Honda Civic Si with the SCCA Badlands Chapter on Saturday. I bought a Snell M-2000 helmet approved by the SCCA racing rules. It's an open-faced helmet, which I wanted specifically because closed-face helmets turn into mini-saunas on hot days. It turned out to be 95 degrees and humid that day. The Honda Civic Si is a great autocross car. It's handling is very nimble with only moderate understeer and has a decent amount of power for longer straightaways, but has difficulty pulling hard out of low-speed sharp turns. The only problem is you have to rev it to 5500 RPMs all the way through 8000 RPMs to get it to pull hard. Below 5500 RPMs there is hardly any torque. It has a high-revving 1.6 liter 4-cylinder engine that puts out 160HP. That's 100 HP per cylinder! Pretty efficient engine.

The winner of the autocross event (against all classes) was a race-prepared BMW M3. A race-prepared Mazda Miata placed second. Someday I will own an E30 or E36 BMW M3.

I made a really cool camera mount so I could video-tape my performance. I went to Lowe's to buy all the hardware parts. It turned out to work really well. I built the thing so solid - it will NOT move even in violent turns and slalom runs. Click here for the video!

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