AONE Autocross

By Kevin Redden

Photos by Stephan de Penasse, Scott Weiner, and Adam deRezendes

The AONE Autocross we did at Thompson Speedway on Sunday, July 17th, was a great success! As expected, we had some delays before getting started since we hadn't done one of these in a while, so the cars didn't actually start running until 11:00. Partly because of that, we blew through our scheduled ending time of 4:00 and didn't finish up until close to 6:00. It was also partly because we had so much fun!

Everyone I talked to had a blast and REALLY liked the layout of the course. Here is close to what we ended up with (there were some onsite modifications):

Thanks to Gene Durso for all his hard work on getting this laid out on paper, and thanks to Tom Lesko for doing the scale drawing of the location from the satellite pic! I would say it was a non-traditional layout for an autocross (usually it's a rectangular sea of cones), and I think this made it a lot easier for newcomers to autocross (and me :-) ) to understand where they are supposed to go. It was a fun course with the average times in the mid 80 seconds and the fastest in the 69 range.

Unlike normal autocrosses, we decided to let each of the 23 drivers have two practice runs to familiarize themselves with the layout. We split the drivers into three run groups and it took us a while to get into a groove, but we finally cycled through all of the practice runs a little after 12:30 (!). For safety and sanity, we decided to run only one car at a time. (We could have started the second when the first reached the turnoff north of the start line, but we were still getting used to the timing equipment and were understaffed, so we decided not to add that extra complexity.) We had a lot of people helping out and pitching in to keep things running smoothly and, although it was a little disorganized, I think it went pretty well. A big THANKS to all who helped out!

The epic battle of the day was between Fraser Stables in his GTV and Adam deRezendes in his Porsche 944 for FTD. Adam was able to squeak out the overall FTD by about 1/2 second, but it came right down to the end! Of course, Fraser won the FTD award because he was actually driving a real car as opposed to the interloper who had to settle for the Fastest Non-Alfa of the Day award.

I had fixed most of the issues with the timekeeping Excel spreadsheet I wrote for our last autocross a couple of years ago and it worked quite well this time (phew!). I had added a feature that displayed the overall results (not by class) on another monitor that folks could come check out without bothering the timekeeper (too much, anyway). Stephan de Penasse's generator allowed us to keep our non-12V electrical stuff running, so thanks for that!

Again, I want to thank Gene, Stephan, and Tom Letourneau for all of the effort that they put into the autocross. Without them, it wouldn't have happened or would not have been the success that it was — great job, guys! I think we all agreed that we'd like to run another one of these this year if we can squeeze it in, and now that we know what we need to fix, it should be even better!

July 17th AONE Autocross Results
Car #	Name	Car	Class	Best Time	Notes
6	Kevin Oliver	GTV6	A	72.281
600	Gregg DiBiaso	Spider	B	72.990
25	Stephan de Penasse	GTV	C	71.975
19	Gregory Stidsen	GTV	C	78.879
3	Fraser Stables	GTV	D	69.368	FTD Alfa
76	Andy Kress	Milano	D	73.742
75	Ian Anderson	Milano	D	75.970
11	Eugene Durso	Spider	D	79.939
1	Giorgio Kradjian	GTV6	E	77.162
69	Kevin Redden	Milano	E	79.581
980	Craig Letourneau	Spider	F	79.403
9	Roger Carlson	Spider	F	90.127
98	Carlos Vargas	Spider	F	98.188
10	Judy Durso	GTV	F	116.496
15	Dan Donovan	Spider	G	85.946
2	Scott Weiner	Spider	G	87.033
5	Adam deRezendes	Porsche 944	N	68.957	FTD non-Alfa
80	Eric Samuelson	Porsche 911	N	73.762
14	Wonil Seo	BMW 325xi	N	79.106
8	Bob Samuelson	Porsche 911	N	80.225
4	Albert Zawengo	Jaguar	N	82.897
12	Deb Donovan	Saab 9-3	N	88.693
7	Dennis Eknof	Stalker	M	72.363