Matt,Originally posted by mdavis:
I didn't drive autocross but I did walk both the initial course and the modified one. I was rather disappointed that the track was moved out of the ~1" dropoff and onto the smooth section of track. A lot of teams run as little ground clearance as possible, but they need to get over it if the track has some bumps. Also the teams running super spindly a-arms are probably not going to like the bumps, but it's a simple matter of not building your car for the super smooth glass sheets that the course can be.
As for your question about using the course maps, we discussed it on the 12 hour drive from Cincinnati to Lincoln, spending time looking over the map, discussing how we would drive it, which ones are the important cones, etc. Unfortunately, we were quite wrong in our initial assumptions, and the extra time to walk the course on Wednesday was massively helpful.
-Matt
PS, that course design handbook was extremely interesting to read. It could be quite helpful for setting up courses in the future for our team.
We changed the AutoX course this year and last year due to one of these concrete seam bumps. Last year we had a rather substantial 1.25"+ step input style bump near the end of a max length rules legal straight. The bump ran diagonal to the driving line and would have probably been in some peoples braking zone. This year, as you know, we had .75"-1" bump at about the midpoint of a medium sized 180deg sweeper.
In both instances the course was moved about 15' feet to the side to avoid the bumps. This was more based on our designed intentions for the course rather than to appease people's complaints. You see there are quite a few concrete squares out there and the courses are designed at home on the computer without knowing where all the nasty bumps are. It also goes along with our thought process from my previous post to Charles, we try to give you guys the best course we can put together. We have 60 acres of concrete, if all we have to do get rid of a bump and make the course better is shift it 15' to the side, why on earth wouldn't you do it? Would we just be lazy?
On an also rather important note, we have a nice site and we'd like to keep it. Placing the course over bumps that we believe might incite contact and potentially damage the site is in no ones best interest. I don't think this years bump would have caused any ground contact, just a lot of unsettling mid corner.
Lawrence