This was my co-driver/student/car owner John Nitis's VERY FIRST AutoX or
motorsports event of any sort, driving his 2002 BMW M3 SMG. He was a total
rookie, besides one BMW car control clinic down at Marina and frequent
terrorizing of the local wildlife on Skyline and Mt. Hamilton, so I've included
all 7 of his runs to provide you veterans a walk (drive?) down memory lane on
what it's like to learn on those first few laps. It's not light weight, 10
minutes of video is 35MB, roughly a 2 hour download on a 56K modem but far far
faster with any respectable broadband connection:
http://www.zfilms.org/temp/JohnsFirstTime.wmv
First run, 46.x
Simply navigating the course, trying remember the course and not to DNF on the
slalom.
Second run, 46.x
John tries to drive "more aggressively", and ends up diving into every big
corner too fast and whacking his first cone.
Third run, 46.x
After explaining to John that to go fast you need to be more aggressive on
corner exit not corner entry, he drives a little timidly and smoothes things
out considerably.
Fourth run, 44.6
After the smooth 3rd run, he starts pushing it more and scores his best
official time of the day good for first place in AS-N!. (yeah, well, so he was
the only one in AS-N, just a technicality...)
Fifth run, first of 3 fun runs, 44.0
A beautifully smooth and 'slow' feeling run and another big improvement.
Sixth run, 42.9
I start yelling at him to get on the throttle earlier and to look ahead, huge
improvement.
Seventh run, 42.7
More yelling, even faster, hmmm....that seems to work well. ;-)
And lastly my last and fastest fun-run in the car for reference.
Thanks again all, great event, and the ability to give a rookie 7 almost
consecutive runs REALLY made the difference and pumped the fun-factor up
substantially.
-Carl
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