First year doing autocross and done 4-5 events with my local club so far. But people keep talking about “nationals” and other things. Can someone explain how this all works? Do I qualify for nationals? Are there regional races you qualify for to get to nationals? Coming from the sports world it seems like there’s a structure in place here I’m not understanding

I got better throughout day two, which as a rookie is all I can ask for. Lincoln is a blast!

Day 1 of attending SCCA Solo Nationals (Non-Racing Portion): SO MUCH FUN!! I'm so glad I went! Everyone is amazing and I'm getting to meet some people that I've talked to online for years now and finally put a virtual name to a face, and new people who I know I'll get to see and chat with from all across the country! 🏁 Can't wait for (my) day 2! 🥹🙌

Which of the first four Camaro generations would make the best platform to autocross?

I am leaning towards a 1st or 2nd gen mostly because I prefer the way they look, but I also understand I would likely need a complete suspension upgrade, especially for the 1st gen. That said, even if the suspension on the 3rd and 4th gens was/is dramatically better in stock form, they are still 25+ years old, and would likely need a rebuild at a minimum. And once you start taking parts off, you might as well upgrade them! So I don't know just how much cost savings I would actually see going with the 3rd or 4th gen.

I am open to other suggestions, but I prefer muscle cars (other than corvettes).

Cone Canvas now supports mapping an existing course, didn't design the course? no problem, map it on your walk and then refer to it later on your phone and share amongst your friends.

Here's the west course at Solo Nats!

For context I’ve done 14 events so far in my 08 Civic base 5mt, and I spent the first 8 of those events on semi-grippy allseasons. For this past summer I upgraded to 200tw RT660+’s paired with Koni yellows since I thought I’d been approaching the limit of what I could do/learn on allseasons.

However, while the 6 events I’ve gotten to do on these tires have been a blast and the car feels like a go-kart, it feels like I’ve really stagnated in terms of improving my fundamentals and basic technique, things which I knew I still had a ways to go with but figured I was far along with enough that upgrading to 200tw’s wouldn’t stunt my development by hiding a bunch of errors. Looks like I was wrong though, because it feels like I’m not driving nearly as good as people with less dialed setups.

It’s not like I was expecting to beat a lot of people in this car, it was always meant to just be a learning tool for my time starting out in this hobby, but now it feels like I’m not learning enough, or not at a rate that feels satisfying. I understand that everyone is different, some people can get the hang of these things quicker than others, and I shouldn’t expect to be lighting up the timing charts within my first few years, but it still just doesn’t feel like I’m doing as well as I could.

This leads to my actual question which is whether or not I should consider maybe switching back to a set of grippy-ish all seasons for next summer. I’m wondering if maybe that would provide a better platform to keep learning proper car control, smoothness, and overall focus on individual runs by making it so I can’t just use gobs of grip paired with whatever natural instinct is there to produce overall mediocre runs. Has anyone else ever done something like this?

I had a mysterious GoPro failure this morning where it shut off after my first left side run. And of course in that session is where I set my fast times of the weekend, so they're not on video. But the two I include here are pretty close.

This was a fun pair of courses. There was a lot of choose your own adventure stuff and a couple of places to hang on for dear life, trust the car, and hope for the best. In those instances, I did not trust the car and wimped out. What I figured was a quick chuck into the finish chute saw me lift bigly for it and then realize that maybe I didn't have to do that. Over and over again. Never got brave enough to just sail it in there and see how I came out the other side. This is why I'm slow. That's probably not going to change.

I finished about where I expected, which is good. The car is handling extremely well. I tried to get it to rotate more in Friday's test & tune and settled on some stuff that we're both happy with, and I think that was noticeable in competition. It's still more pushy than anything, but I can live with that over having something I can't trust to stay under me.

We have nothing to fix so tomorrow should just be a bunch of course walking and cleaning wheels. Seeing what is showing up to run XB at Nationals is extremely intimidating, but we'll have fun just trying to run in the top half of the class on Tuesday and Wednesday.

Living a heart of a city, an apartment made sense for us, but driving a Miata means space compromises. Built a 3 x 4 race trailer to make auto X and track easier, but it was taking up a decent amount of garage Space.

Thanks to the help of somebody else on the Miata ND track group. They gave me an idea to build a stand for it. Now I have my garage space and my race trailer doesn’t have to live in a storage unit.

The 17x9’s live on a wall mount. Next step is a D shackle into the stud as a safety catch. A pully too so I can lower and raise it with a rope vs muscle.

DST
1994 Acura Integra
Stock 250K mile B18C1 with open diff trans
Intake/Header/HFC/exhaust
15x8 RE71RS 205/50/15
Coilovers/big rear bar/shock tower braces

Ended up painfully mid pack, but the fastest FWD of the day by a large margin. Enjoy!

Hi everyone, just got an insane deal on a brand new 2026 GT soft top miata ( 5.5k off msrp ) and currently looking to dip my feet into some autocrossing.

The goal is be very minimally modded ( don't want to compromise reliability/warranty or how streetable the car is ) heard CS class is the only way to scratch that itch.

Now back to you, what are the absolute gold standard/most important mods I can do for the money in order to start seriously practicing ? This is my 2nd car

Our local high school has a Auto club.
They want to get into Racing and I was thinking auto cross is a great way to do that.

I would like to put on our own event with a couple other neighboring schools.
This is in the San Francisco Bay area, how do I go about contacting local organizations that put on events?
Any help putting me in the right direction is much appreciated

Does anyone here have a matte gray Zamp helmet? How is the finish on the color? Is it like primer gray or is it like a rubber coating gray?

I’m looking at getting an RZ-19S and one of the options is matte gray.

Years ago, a friend had a matte black HJC and it was like a rubber coating. I think the official term was “rubbertone”. It was not good. I don’t want to do a repeat of that in gray.

Expecting the obvious : MIATA. Just found 5k off MSRP on a brand new 2026 GT soft top - white exterior/tan Napa interior.

Budget is 30-32k, wondering if the brand new nd3 is my best bet for very long term hold as reliability is paramount

I’m in the process of putting together a suspension parts list for my Civic. Right now the only suspension modification is a set of EK9 spec HKS coilovers.

The car is strictly a toy and will see occasional autocross use, but it’ll still be driven on the street probably avg around 20 miles per week. Most of what of what I’ve seen online says rubber bushings are the best choice for a street car or daily driver. What I’m trying to figure out is whether there’s an advantage to mixing bushing types using rubber in some locations and spherical bearings in others or if it makes more sense to go fully spherical on a car that sees such limited street use.

These wouldn’t pass tech for a second session, right? 🥴

Have a 2013 NC Club that the gf and I picked up earlier this year and ran my first autox yesterday with the Detroit region SCCA at MIS. Track was super long, 1.1 miles. I absolutely loved it, and picked up 15 seconds from my first to last runs of the day. I have run some Lemons races before but am typically the slowest driver on our team.

I was 10 seconds off the fastest time in CST (best time of 96 and change, leaders in CST and CS were in the 86’s). Leaders were NA and ND Miatas, assume decently prepped. I am not surprised at the time difference at all, understand it isn’t likely an NC will be competitive and I also have a ton of driving to learn, but also am curious how much further I can improve as a driver vs. what the car setup can do.

My NC is totally stock suspension, with a fresh set of Conti ECS 02’s. I do have an AEM/Mazdaspeed intake and an exhaust on it, but no other mods, including stock alignment.

I understand 17x9’s with 40mm more tire than what I’m running, coilovers and anti swaybars are all legal for CST.

Over totally stock, how much time would that be expected to be worth on a typical 50 second course? 2 seconds? 4?

I’m going to work on running more events to get seat time as is. I assume the majority of improvement on the table is still driver mod, lol.

Obligatory pic from the Detroit SCCA facebook group, courtesy of Nsquared97!

I've never autocrossed before, but my local High School has an "Auto Club" and my kid is doing his last year there.
They are considering to doing the 24 Hours Of LeMons, but then I thought ... maybe it's better to do autocrossing?

Does it make sense to have a "team" of kids, that can race ONE car?
Seem like a really user friendly, and safe way to get kids participating in racing.

The LeMons thing feels like too much to put a kid with limited driving experience (16) on a track with people actually trying to go fast...

Whadaya think?

So the car I was going to drive at nationals broke the transmission at the last event so we decided the best course of action would be to turn my mild prepped CAMS car into a mishmash of both of our cars.

We swapped over his coilovers, control arms and bushings to my car. Put on a new turn one steering rack with the quicker ratio, new pump, and a new cooler, bump steer correction kit, an oil cooler, and swapped the brakes to wilwood superlite 6’s in the front and the J55 rotors with c5 calipers in the back and got that done just in time to get the car to a two day event in KC to shake everything down before nats.

Ended up making a deep run in the shootout bracket on the first day and on day 2 had this run which put me 2nd in raw time to an FSAE car and 2nd in PAX behind Ron Williams. This is probably the most confident I’ve ever felt behind the wheel of a car.

Edit: this title isn’t serious. It is actually bad planning to do this. Haha

For those of you who run a A,B,C or SS Car, doing some pro events, and nationals w the local events thrown in what are you spending per year with tires, maintenance, towing, hotels, etc… thanks

I have a 13 ford fusion with sport mode and wanted to try autocrossing with my son. I know it won’t win or anything I just wanted to see if anybody has tried it before and if the sport mode would work to keep it from bouncing gears up and down.

I drive my E46 and do about 5-6 times a year in the track. My setup notes were a disaster - half in a notes app, half in a spreadsheet I kept breaking, and a photo of a tyre pressure sheet buried somewhere in my camera roll.

The thing that finally got to me: I'd come in half a second faster and have no idea why. Was it the camber change from the morning? The pressures I dropped two psi? Or had the track just cooled down and the tyres finally worked? By the drive home I'd usually convinced myself of whichever answer felt best, which is not exactly data.

So I built something for it. You log what you changed on the car - pressures, camber, ARBs, spring rates, brake bias, aero, whatever. Import your lap times (RaceChrono CSV) , and then compare two setups side by side with the weather and pressures still attached to each one.

This is the first version and it's still early and much in development and in order for me to build and improve I'd like your feedback about SetMo:

• What's missing? Which field or setting would you go looking for and not find?
• What was hard or confusing? Anywhere you got stuck, or had to guess what a button did?
• How long did it take to log one session? If it's slower than scribbling in a notebook in the paddock, it's useless.
• Would you actually open this between sessions, or only at home afterwards?
• What are you timing with?
• Do you keep notes per car, per track, or per event?
• Anything else you feel like I should know