12:05 Garage- ’70 Duster build

racerjoe said
Moparty 2022 auto cross recap.
The autocross course was pretty much the same layout as last year but I think some of the cone spacing may have been different. It took a few runs to determine how much I could push the car. I ended the morning session with a 41.4x as my fastest time. That was good enough for 5th overall in autocross. I didn't improve on the afternoon session and fell to 10th overall after more people showed up and others improved. I was really hoping to get into the 40s the following day. After the morning session the second day, no one below me improved nor did I. I remained in 10th overall out of 50 cars. Late in the afternoon session I finally got a 40.8 on 3rd to last run. I was super pumped! The next run I slowed down, then the last run I backed up my best time with another 40.8. This put me in 9th overall out of 50 cars in autocross! I'll take that! I was unsure of how many of those cars in front of me were in the vintage class until the results were posted online. Turns out I was 4th in the vintage class on autocross! Two of the guys in front of me were 1st and 2nd place grand champion finishers for the last 3 years. I would need to knock off .6 seconds to beat the second place guy, but 4 seconds to catch first! That likely won't happen. (3rd place was a dodge omni and I was only .2 seconds behind him)
I'd like to point out there were 2 very high dollar E-bodies out there. One has the full speed tech suspension which I'm sure is north of $20K and the other had a full Shwartz performance chassis. I was over 2 seconds faster than both of them. I understand a lot of it has to do with the driver, but it makes me feel good that my garage built pile of bolts performed so well.
I'll cover more and add some pictures soon.

Strong work!!! :thumbsup:

Sounds like you put down some great times and had fun doing it, which is the most important part.

My experience with doing some autoX like that before is that the fastest cars weren’t necessarily the best handling, they were the ones whose drivers had a ton of experience, especially experience in that particular car. Seat time in the car your autoX’ing makes a huge difference, and so does having your car set up/tuned well.

That’s where I usually see the big dollar cars lose out. It’s not that their $20k dollar suspension can’t handle, it’s more like their owners just bolted it in and expected it to be lighting fast out of the box because they spent a ton of money. But just because you dropped $20k doesn’t mean you can skip the set up and tuning part. And then seat time too. Even if you have the fastest car out there you won’t be able to drive it the fastest if you’re not spending the seat time in the car to know all the particulars of what it does best and how to do that.