Weee. It's finally here the 2009 autocross season has finally started and it got off to a great start even if the weather tossed us all a curve ball on Saturday with a bit of rain which slowed some people down but didn't bother others. I did take project umbrella out there but since it was heavily overcast most of the day I decided I didn't need to use it until it started to rain. Of course even though it was overcast I STILL got a bit burnt. But the umbrella did keep my camera and video equipement nice and dry an allowed me to keep filming in the rain. Well until the battery died and I ran out of space on the camera while shooting raw which thanks to me setting the camera up wrong turned out nothing but crap.

I only attended the Saturday event but I have to say there was a rather large turn out for a cold first day event. There was a large crowd of novice and first time drivers and drivers who where in the new run group called IMS. Also out there was the black Corvette with the huge monster wing from last year. He started off the day run around in circles doing god knows what (breaking in new tires?) and he ended up almost wrecking his car as he had to have come inches away from hitting one of the light poles in the parking lot. He didn't last long as on his second (third?) run of the day his car started making some horrid grinding noises and he just let loose and whipped his car around the course madly and called it a day. It was at that time that the video camera battery died right after his first corner so I was upset that I didn't get any video of that last run.

I got all my videos uploaded to youtube of course so you can check them out and I also dumped my snapshots that did turn out on to flickr as well. Next race is April 18 and 19 but I'll most likely only go to the one on the 19th as the one on the 18th is a training day for younger drivers. Hopefully by then I'll have found an actual battery that will work for my video camera.

Here's Leo taking a little spin in his Mazda RX-7

Figure I should post this now because frankly if I waited to post this until I was actually done uploading all 84 videos that I took it would probably be time for the next autocross. Also I haven't posted anything for a week which is bad.

This event was held again out at the Idaho Center which ment a bit of a drive made worse by road paving work and detours. I only took the Canon G6 out this time just to film and with 2 1/2 gigs worth of flash cards and two batteries I was done before the start of the second half. For me that was good because it was getting hot (101 atleast add the heat from the pavement and wow it was HOT) , I was getting hot and it was getting late for me since I had to head back home to get some sleep before work.

Checking out the course it looked very tight and compact. Loads of tight corners and a pair of tight slaloms and no where to go full throttle. If you even got out of 2nd gear you were doing something really good (or driving a small car) Great for the smaller NA cars and go carts not so good for the hard charging Corvettes and cars with turbos. As usuall there was a nice assortment of cars out for the day but I was a very happy camper as two new Porsche showed up to race as well. I got the White V8 powered 914 the lovely blue 911 ducktail and two newer porsches a 911 targa and 911 C4. They were both Novices so were a bit slower than others but still I was grinning from the extra Porsches now if the Silver GT3RS would come out to play it would be great.

Without much room to get into the gas much and the hot weather making the tires grippy it made for a quit race track with no spin outs or lockups and a pretty stable course. Pretty much the most sliding I saw was from tail happy smaller cars like the older Toyota Corrola and an older RX-7. All in all I had a good time and I'm sure everyone else out ther was having a good time as well.

Some things that I need to change is that I need to get a much better camera a HUGE umbrella (my own RQ would be nice too) and a water someting or another to spray my sorry hot ass with water when I get over heated. The second battery that I got a while ago was great but I don't want to get any more compact flash cars just yet as I don't know what the new camera will use for media. Some cool things that happened is that people told that they were looking forward to the new videos so that was great and the Idaho Rotary club wanted to use my videos for their booth at some Rotary gathering soon. So I also need to get all the raw videos uploaded to the internet or on a DVD for them as well. Until the next race enjoy the videos.