Unfortunately the new racing harness didn’t help me do any better at last Sunday’s autocross, where I spent five of my six runs re-learning to control the car with the new tire and alignment setup. As I found out, the new alignment makes the car considerably more responsive but also equally less forgiving; where rough steering inputs used to be dampened out by the car’s tendency to understeer, the car now happily rotates in response to sudden turns of the wheel—intentional or otherwise. To compound things, the lot where we were running (Oakland Coliseum) had a lot of loose dirt and sand (“marbles”) anywhere where people weren’t driving—that is, “off the line”. So whenever I would lose control of the car a little, I would go off-line, onto the slippery marbles where the loss of control would only get worse.

That being said I managed not to spin the car (as has happened to me at Oakland before), though I came close a couple times, and I finally managed to pull things together on my final run… although it was a “fun run” and didn’t count towards my competitive results, unfortunately.

• 2004.03.21 (Oakland) run 1
• 2004.03.21 (Oakland) run 2
• 2004.03.21 (Oakland) run 3
• 2004.03.21 (Oakland) fun run 1
• 2004.03.21 (Oakland) fun run 2
• 2004.03.21 (Oakland) fun run 3

I also ran at an event at Candlestick Park a couple weeks ago, where I fared somewhat better (third place). Unfortunately at that event the course proved too much for my camera mount, which was unable to grip the camera tightly enough to prevent it from rotating around on a particularly hard turn going into the first slalom in the course. Consequently after about 20 seconds or so the camera would inevitably end up pointed at the back of the front passenger seat.

I fixed the camera mount last week though this Sunday I opted to use the front camera which I had recently replaced. The results from the camera were not as good as I had hoped, either, as the cheap camera seems to cope poorly with sudden changes in lighting; my runs were very late in the afternoon so the camera would go very quickly from pointing almost at the sun, to pointing away from the sun. Unfortunately it seems that camera is really only suited for midday use. The only thing it has going for it over the camera mount in the rear of the car (where I can mount my DV camcorder which yields a substantially better picture) is a fantastic unobstructed view of the course in front of the car.