2015 Nationals – Side by Side Video

Every autocrosser knows that the trip home from Nationals is one during which you reflect on how you did and what’s planned for next year. This year, with our switch to radial tires we knew we weren’t ready, but of course that’s tough for the ego to take. The quest for more speed always begins shortly after you get home.

This year, with some video in hand I decided to try and take a closer look at some of our competitors to see how we measured up. Robert Lewis put in some hard work this year and ended up with a 2nd place finish behind Mike Maier. Miley doesn’t share any video from his runs, but Robert does! Putting the videos side by side I figured we could identify some areas we got beat and potentially find some more speed…

This is a comparison of Todd and Robert’s best runs from the East course on Day 1. Not being a whiz in video editing, I didn’t get to do as much as I wanted (I’d really like to be able to add “sectors” to a video, not unlike data analysis and look at the time delta, but alas, I’m not that smart…

Anyways, a few take aways for us:

Our car sucks on launch. Yes the timers are after you launch, but Robert’s car gets moving with less drama and is moving much faster by the time he crosses the line.
We seem to be on par at higher speed.

Day 2 is much the same. We are killed out of any low-speed element, but the higher speed sections or the slaloms we seem to be able to hold our own or catch up a bit.

Not scientific, but interesting nonetheless!