Quote:
Originally Posted by Sportsguy83
Free the video!!!
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Nah. I approve of Jay "hiding" it. He's a standup guy looking out for his friends in his club, a group he appears to have been racing with for a good many years. I could see someone forwarding this to The Authorities, and you know what they're likely to do.
Jay's right, and I encourage you, Jay, to "burn" that video.
There's been enough suffering by Jay, and let's hope they take measures to see that there will NEVER be any injuries.
I'll tell you guys whatever you need to know, inasmuch as my sieve-of-a-memory can manage. It's actually quite dull.
The OP, the driver, Jay, did NOTHING wrong. He simply barreled (if you’ll pardon the expression, Jay
) into a slalom sequence (left-right-left-right-etc.) with a bit too much optimism. It was a tricky sequence the way it had your car sliding around the slow hairpin left, then immediately transitioning into a sharpish right while accelerating hard, which put the car into a nice tail-out slide to the right (straight at an embankment), and then one had to turn sharply to the left around the slalom. The car never finished turning right before he ran out of road and up the earthen embankment with lots of left-hand lock dialed into the steering. It was NOT understeering as a number of others here, including Jay, have noted.
If the track had been safe, with sufficient run-off room, he’d likely just have missed the next succeeding slalom cone and DQ’d. Jay did NOTHING “wrong,” so there’s nothing unusual to learn from his driving.
Jay’s driving was NOT the proximate cause of his unfortunate roll-over. Drivers do this sort of thing all the time without consequence on safe courses with adequate run-off area.
The problem, and the reason for the roll-over, was because only a few yards to the right of this slalom there was a tall and very steep earthen embankment. The embankment WAS the run-off area, so the OP’s car helplessly slid up the embankment and slowly toppled over onto his head, fortunately without injury, it appears.
The problem, a serious one, lay with the
course design which placed dangerous hazards within the range of a
sliding car. That embankment did not appear to be the
only hazard on that course. Looking at that place, I’m not sure it is even
possible to design a safe autocross course on those grounds.
The place looks more suited to one of those British gymkhana events where the cars don’t exceed maybe 20 mph and are forever screeching to a dead stop, reversing wildly backwards into boxes, and zooming out again. Here is a very impressive video of a guy running a Lotus 7 around one of these courses in Great Britain. It sounds boring, but it’s spectacular.
You'll like this video much better than Jay's unfortunate adventure up an earth bank.
[ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RHgjFPhhzY8"]7 Gymkhana - YouTube[/ame]
Jay and his club may wish to investigate that form of competition given the dearth of suitable local venues for the much faster form of autocrossing. Note that the time of 66 seconds is comparable to our faster autocross times.
Jay, I hope you approve of my recollection of events, and, again, I'm glad you walked away from that.