An Old Autocross Course Map (30 Day Map Challenge #11: Pen and Paper) (Shallow Thoughts)

An Old Autocross Course Map (30 Day Map Challenge #11: Pen and Paper)

I was going through some old paper files last year and discovered something I thought I'd lost: the event flyer and course map for the first autocross course I designed.

Autocross, or SCCA Solo II as it's technically called in the US, is car racing on a miniature course defined by orange traffic cones in a parking lot, airstrip or other available expanse of pavement. Lots of people autocross their street cars, but there are classes for everything up to highly modified open-wheel formula cars.

I got started autocrossing in Los Alamos in the late 80s, driving my Nissan 200SX turbo. In those days, there was an autocross club based in Los Alamos, with the somewhat unweildy name Sports Car Club del Valle Rio Grande (SCCdVRG for short). We raced in the parking lot of the middle school, and many of us also drove to events in Albuquerque, and sometimes farther away, like Roswell, Salt Lake City, Durango and Bayfield CO, and Salina KS (where Nationals was held).

In autocross, everyone helps with the various jobs that need to be done: unloading and loading the trailer, setting up the course, timing and scoring, picking up cones. But designing a course takes experience, especially on a lot as tiny as the middle school where you have to take care not to send the faster cars spinning into a lightpost. I remember my excitement when I was finally deemed ready to design a course.

My #1 goal was to include a slalom. (That's a row of equally-spaced cones where the object is to go right of the first cone, left of the second, and so forth.) A slalom was hard to fit in a lot that size, but I liked slaloms and wanted a chance to practice them. And I manged it, barely — just a short 3-cone slalom going diagonally across the lot.

And the course map flyer! I had fun with it. I spent (as you see) way too much time on laying it out and adding little in-jokes, like a picture of a Pitts biplane where the pits would be (where the cars stay when they're not running).

This was before widespread availability of desktop publishing tools. I had a Sun workstation on my desk at work (and just an ASCII terminal at home). I don't think Suns had anything like GIMP or Inkscape or OpenOffice back then. So it was all literal cut and paste, with lots of scraps of paper. The text was probably produced on the Sun, and printed on a laser printer, but I don't remember what program I used. I cut the various text pieces into strips to tape or glue onto the master copy.

The original date was apparently snowed out; the flyer I have says that it was rescheduled from March to April. The April weather must have been okay, because the event did happen. I remember being pleased at the slalom, but in general the course was tighter and slower than I had intended (a common problem for newbie course designers, putting in too many turns for the available space). Still, it was drivable and I think we all had fun racing after an extremely snowy race-free winter.

Now, many years later, I'm back in Los Alamos, but there's no longer any autocrossing here. That's a shame. I think there are sometimes autocrosses in Albuquerque and Farmington, but driving multiple hours to events in California burned me out, and the SCCA Solo find-an-event page doesn't even list anything that close. (Though admittedly, searching in November probably doesn't mean much; I should repeat that search in April.)

Regardless, it's fun to look back at the old course map and think about those days.