Southern Arizona Region Cinco de Mayo Autocross

By David Witteried

Every spring the Southern Arizona Region (SAR) in Tucson Arizona hosts a multi-event weekend consisting of a concours and autocross. I have been attending the autocross for the last four years. This year the autocross was held at a track at the Central Arizona College near Casa Grande Arizona. The great thing about this event is that it is held on a track with continuous lapping… the bad part is that it is an eight hour drive from my home! As usual I got up early on Saturday morning started driving east. I telephoned Rob Rossitto who was also coming and found that he was delayed leaving town. A few hours later as I was pulling out of Coachella I heard from Rob who was just descending into the San Bernardino area. As I progressed east it was apparent that Rob was overtaking me and he soon caught up with me just beyond Gila Bend and about an hour outside our destination at Casa Grande. After checking into our hotels and meeting up with two of our autocross buddies, Mike Furnish and Bob Bertrand, we climbed into my truck and headed to our favorite local Mexican restaurant for dinner where we traded stories and caught up with each other. Sunday morning was sunny and looked like a great day in store. The four of us formed a caravan to the College where we found the SAR folks already set up and the pit area a flurry of activity as everyone was getting their Porsches ready to go. Mike Furnish and I were both instructing and we were introduced to our students. My student, Lee Cuevas, had a nice 944 which he had been autocrossing for about a year. He had done several events and was interested in learning some new techniques as his previous instructors had mostly concentrated on teaching the “correct” line. We decided to work on steering and braking techniques. The first practice session we went out in Lee’s Porsche and worked on being smooth with the steering and brake inputs. We then went out in my Porsche and I showed Lee when and how to use an early apex as apposed to the safer late apex maneuver he had already been taught. I also inadvertently took Lee on an off-track excursion when I entered one turn a little too soon! On Lee’s next practice session he was noticeably faster and even overtook a few other slower drivers. At the end of the day we had all had a great time and Lee had knocked 3 seconds off his previous best time at this track! Needless to say he was really excited by this improvement and plans on reading more about driving and doing more autocrosses. It’s always satisfying to see a student improve as some of the subtleties of driving fast sink in! How did I do? I also took 3 seconds off my best time from last year and was only about a second behind Mike Furnish in his Boxster S… and Mike is a really fast driver… so I felt pretty good too!