August 14th AutoX: Take me down to Understeer City where the tires don't grip and the girls somewhat look pretty

So far this year has been going good in terms of how the car has been handling BUT this weekend I experienced something for the first time in a long time: An ILL-handling car with UNDERSTEER...double ugh.

 

As you can gather from the picture above, I would turn the wheel either left or right (depending on the corner) but the car kept going straight and thus would not turn!  And yours truly was the cause of it because I decided to take a chance on a different alignment setup to see if I could be faster.  Well, I found out the hard way that it didn't work because there was a NEAR-MASSIVE amount of understeer which had me adjust my driving-style to where I was compensating for it by stepping out the rear end more than usual for a grip event.  Combine that with an LSD that locks too tight and you had "drift-exhibition" every corner exit and this is an autocross mind you!  So put all that together and it resulted in slower times than my competitors unfortunately. Back to the drawing board...  

The pic above is my own motivation for my stance on understeer which is NOT cooler than drifting!  Understeer is NOT your friend or your cute girlfriend- it's a nasty thing which should be dragged out into the field and shot ten times over.  To put it simply: F*CK UNDERSTEER. 
 
To top that off, I was reminded of another thing that DOES NOT really work for me: Co-driving for championships.  I am totally cool sharing my car for a practice day and having my friends take my car for a few runs BUT, it seems like things don't work out in my favor when I share my car with another driver for a championship.  And things didn't certainly work out for me sharing my car with my good buddy because:

#1: I Could not concentrate due to worrying about my co-driver and what he was doing to my car

#2: The Run-Group I ran in was unfortunately managed by an overly-excited grid master who rushed the cars through waaay too fast. And...

#3: I did not have enough time in-between runs to "cool-off" both myself and the car and thus, did not have time to think and figure out where to go faster on course.

SO, I ended up getting 3rd place which I really had to drive my butt off to do since the car was not handling well.  I can't totally blame my car though; part of it is on me since I felt that I did not read and drive the course well enough to be the fastest in my class. You cannot always be the fast one every event but I think you can come damn close to it...I'll drive my socks off to do so!

Just bring on the next event please...

Couldn't find a pic from this past weekend's event but here's a link to a vid taken with a go-pro during one of my practice runs:

PRACTICE AutoX August 13-14th: Roach Cam Angle! 

And event results are here:

August 14th Championship