Autocross day with a 3 S Touring coming up

[JiinXC]

Hey Everyone

Long story short a friend of mine convinced me to take my fairly new 3ST to an autocross event he frequents. I've been a passenger but never drove in an autocross before so this should be interesting. Has anyone driven in an autocross or track day with their shiny new car?

Im trying to figure out what should I expect from the 3? It seems like a reasonably sporty car on regular roads, but Im pretty sure when I start pushing it on course its going to start under-steering all over the place. Im also trying to decide how I want to use all the different transmission modes? Leaving it in auto with sport mode is probably the easiest, but maybe manual mode with the sport button will keep the car from inadvertently shifting.

The car is a bone stock 3 S Touring with 7100 miles on it. Im going to be taking it for its first service this weekend and the autocross event is the next weekend. Unfortunately I dont have a Go Pro so no videos of me in action, but hopefully someone will take a couple of pictures of me snow plowing some cones on course for me to share with you all.

 

[JAmador]

Never done it with a new car, but I used to thrash my Saturn around an auto-x track every couple weeks when I was in college.
Make sure to crank up your tire PSI when you get to the track. I usually ran near the max PSI indicated on the sidewall.
Less fuel = less weight
Not sure on the transmission modes, since I've only test driven a 6MT 3i, but I typically auto-x doesn't really exceed 45-50mph, so manual mode to keep it from dropping into too high a gear would probably help.

Most of all, just have fun, learn, take rides with other drivers & do it again.

 

[Chibana]

Does the S Touring have the Sport mode? I think it does. If so, I would definitely recommend Sport-Manual mode. Throttle response is quicker in Sport mode, making the car more responsive to throttle inputs.

 

[ceric]

^+1
I second that. When I turned it on with my wife shotgun next to me, she asked, "what happened to the engine?"
Sweet!

 

[mwarps]

Manual in first to start (starting hard from a stop in 2 is slow) but once you shift into second you won't be taking out of second.

It'll do ~63 at the limiter in second (well, mine does) and I can't imaging going faster than that on an autocross course.

 

[JiinXC]

The autocross event was tons of fun and being my first event driving Im pretty happy with the result. 2 DNFs for getting off course and 6 cones total on my other 6 runs.

I think the car was great; it performed better than I would have imagined. The course was setup with a few long left/right, right/left sweepers that were actually pretty fast and the car was able to make the transition one way to the other pretty quick. The car didn't really have problem in the slalom sections either.

The automatic with sport mode was interesting. I followed Chibanas advice and ran with sport-manual mode and it think it was fine. The only difficult thing was getting a good launch at the start I couldn't get the car up to high RPM without creeping forward; -1 for only two pedals. At the start the tires would spin most of the way through first unless if I let off real quick to reestablish grip, once in 2nd I dont think I was able to get the tires to spin from too much throttle. I was going to try one run leaving it in sport-automatic mode, but forgot about it since I was trying to break below 90 seconds clean.

The big letdown was the tires and I was expecting that from the get go. I started the day running with pressures at 44/40. In the afternoon I lowered the pressures to 42/38 and my last run I tried 40/36. Regardless of what I did the tires were not up to the task, they were howling for probably 3/4 of the course. Part of that might have been over-driving the tires, but I was hoping for better. If I had better rubber on the car my times would probably be 5-6 seconds lower.

When I get home from work Ill upload my times and the results with the other cars in my class and hopefully the club will have some pictures uploaded so I can share them with you all.