I arrived Sunday morning ready to race and with a new strategy for walking the course at my third autocrossing event in the 1968 Camaro with my local SCCA club here in Hawaii. At the January event I had sketched the course as I walked it but found it difficult to keep to scale and therefore not as useful as it could have been. For my third race in the Camaro I downloaded an aerial map of the parking lot where we autocross at the Aloha Stadium and pasted it on a single sheet of paper along with some space allotted for times and notes from each run. My hope was to collect some data that would help me improve my driving skills for SCCA Solo II generally and for autocrossing and racing in my first generation Camaro specifically. After arriving and tech’ing in, I got my clipboard out and walked the course, noting where each cone was placed on the image. This was easier than you might think since the parking lot is riddled with white lines indicating each parking space, which are generally easy to follow and place cones precisely on the map. Unfortunately, I had not accounted exactly for the space we race in, so I had to do some free-hand coverage of the course off my image on one side. My Heat, Heat 3, was scheduled to run in the middle of the day after lunch so I had an opportunity to watch others run the course after I had copied it to my map, and make some corrections on the free-hand part and also start to note the best “lines” in which to try to get my Camaro.
The course was slower than the other two I had raced in so I expected to be out there a bit longer. As you can see from the map I scanned in and provided here, it started off with a turn to the left through a section that was sorta like a modified slalom in that it was a series of lefts alternating with right turns to keep you from hitting any cones. It was slower than a slalom in that rather than a straight line each point was out past the last, so you had to turn farther in for each than you would in a slalom with straight cones. This was followed by a 180 degree turn to the right, and, after a short straight, another 180 degree turn, this time to the left. Then followed a slalom, followed by a 90 degree turn to the right, a turn to the left, a long sweeper to the right coming all the way around 180 degrees, than another slalom followed by two tight corners to slow you down before the exit. Kudos to the volunteers who set up the course; it was a lot of fun!