Wednesday, April 20, 2016

Up to Par with my Project Car

This past weekend the NRSCCA held a "Super Weekend", cramming three events into one weekend.  Though the days were long and the dirt was everywhere, I made it through the weekend incredibly happy with the results.  I can now confidently say that I am no longer a limitation to my car's abilities.

When I first started doing rallycross, it was mostly to have fun and feel the changes in my 2000 Impreza 2.5 RS Project Car.  With each event, the car would feel more solid, easier to control, and closer to what I thought it should be like to be a rally-bred time slayer.  However, as I built up the car, I also wanted to improve as a driver so I started sharing the seat with other more experienced drivers.  My Co-Drivers were rallycross veterans, some of whom had even gone and competed at SCCA Rallycross Nationals... so there was a lot of experience to glean some help and advice from.  As expected, my instructors would routinely show me what my car could REALLY do, besting my quickest laps around the course by a handful of seconds.

Since I started competing seriously with rallycross over a year ago, I've been improving my car AND my skills.  Shaving tenths of seconds off each lap attacking and committing more with each lap started to close the gap between the times I was aiming for that my mentors were setting.  During the Super Weekend, I got a LOT of seat time to really focus on improving and trying new things out.  The Rallycross School really helped, as there wasn't a limit on how many laps you could take of the course.  Instead of being limited to 4 or 5 runs in competition, I now was able to keep running through putting what I had learned to the dirt.

By the end of the weekend, I not only managed to improve as a driver... but the times showed that I wasn't a hindrance to my car's abilities.  I was setting the same (and sometimes even faster) times as those who had instructed me!  It's a huge feeling of accomplishment to finally reach that point, but now even more promising to have this to keep building on.  My RS Coupe and I are finally on the same page and I can't WAIT to keep clawing back time as the season continues!

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