Lane's SCA - 2003 SPC Rally (9)

Highway sign
  On our way to the plant for the autocross.

Gas for me to drive down to Spring Hill, TN: $35
Drive time from Wisconsin: 11 hours
Blocking off the Interstate for a picture: priceless.

For our visit, the local Tennessee region SCCA held a SOLO II autocross on the Saturn plant grounds. If you're not familiar with what an autocross is, take a look HERE.

Basically, a course is outlined in a large parking lot with cones. Timing equipment is used to measure how long it takes you to pilot your way though. For each cone that you hit, two seconds is added to your total time. Cars are divided into classes, and awards are presented for top placings in each class.

The short bus
We all wondered what kind of times the short bus would run.

Lane in the rain
Picture of me courtesy of Kevin K - thanks!.

Soon after the cones were set up and we walked the course a few times, it began to rain.  While our times may not have been as good as they would have been if the pavement would have been dry, it gave us a great opportunity to see how the cars handled when pushed hard in the rain.

Jeff P and Denise B drove their green '92 SL2 from Torrington, CT. They co-drove the car on both the dragstrip and for the autocross, making sure it hardly had a rest between floggings. Denise did great in the bracket at the dragstrip, and Jeff turned some damn good times with the car on the autocross course. All that, with nearly 200k miles on the clock.

Click the link below for some video of Denise behind the wheel.

.AVI (requires Divx 5 codec) - 806k

Divx 5 codec info/download HERE.

Be sure to turn up your sound.

VW on 3
  Picture courtesy Darin H - thanks!.

Quite a variety of European cars joined us on the autocross course from EuroFest. There were VWs, Porsches, BMWs, an Alfa Romeo, Mini Cooper S, and others.

The VWs always look great 3-wheeling. And this was in the rain too!

The EuroFest crowd seemed a bit upset that they weren't doing as well as they expected to do on the course. Especially with the times that some of the more experienced Saturn autocrossers were turning. I've heard that they even thought we were all Saturn employees or test drivers, and that we'd driven this course daily. That's quite flattering, but it's not the case. Regardless, it did make us feel pretty darn good about our driving. :)