Looking for others to show up and join me for a little fun with your car. The concept is that you drive what is best termed a "street course", where the organizers have set up a 40 second to 1 minute course by marking it out with dozens of orange safety cones in a large open, flat area. The courses are purposefully designed for safety, of you and the car. The course design goal is to nominally keep speeds below 60mph, often well below that. You are alone on the track, so no other vehicles to come into contact with.
Examples of the areas used are portions of airstrips (College Station and Mineral Wells), arranged on smaller road courses and tracks (Grandsport Speedway in Hitchcock, the Houston the Police Academy, something south of DFW I forget the name, and I think Texas Motor Speedway(?)), and very large parking lots (a church in Austin, the Gulf Greyhound Park in Webster).
There's only one thing you MUST do to prepare your car, clean it out. You must remove all loose objects, including floor mats. You are required to wear a helmet (Snell rated M/SA2010 or M/SA2015) but most events will have free loaners on site if you don't have one.
I've had a great time at these, very friendly people. Yes, they are nice even to the weird BEV guy showing up at the BMW events.
They have people that are ready and excited to coach new people, from the passenger seat if you want. You can even ride along with an instructor in their vehicle.
One thing you'll want at some point though is appropriate tires. That's really all the Model 3 needs to be "plausible competitor" in Autocross. The first time out I used my factory MXM4 tires and was heavily limited by this. It was also hard on the tires. The good news is if you are up to swapping your wheels on the day you go out, I have a set of "beginner wheels" with life still in them that I'm going to be graduating from.
I'm basically selling them for the rims, which are basic budget functional rims, and they come with these "free" tires on them. I'd still keep using them myself except I need different rims anyway to make room for a different set of brake discs.
P.S. Note that the brake discs aren't for Autocross, in fact I'll be swapping factory discs back for SCCA Autocross days since they aren't legal for the stock class. So you're not stepping into a money pit, here.
Examples of the areas used are portions of airstrips (College Station and Mineral Wells), arranged on smaller road courses and tracks (Grandsport Speedway in Hitchcock, the Houston the Police Academy, something south of DFW I forget the name, and I think Texas Motor Speedway(?)), and very large parking lots (a church in Austin, the Gulf Greyhound Park in Webster).
There's only one thing you MUST do to prepare your car, clean it out. You must remove all loose objects, including floor mats. You are required to wear a helmet (Snell rated M/SA2010 or M/SA2015) but most events will have free loaners on site if you don't have one.
I've had a great time at these, very friendly people. Yes, they are nice even to the weird BEV guy showing up at the BMW events.
They have people that are ready and excited to coach new people, from the passenger seat if you want. You can even ride along with an instructor in their vehicle.One thing you'll want at some point though is appropriate tires. That's really all the Model 3 needs to be "plausible competitor" in Autocross. The first time out I used my factory MXM4 tires and was heavily limited by this. It was also hard on the tires. The good news is if you are up to swapping your wheels on the day you go out, I have a set of "beginner wheels" with life still in them that I'm going to be graduating from.
I'm basically selling them for the rims, which are basic budget functional rims, and they come with these "free" tires on them. I'd still keep using them myself except I need different rims anyway to make room for a different set of brake discs.
P.S. Note that the brake discs aren't for Autocross, in fact I'll be swapping factory discs back for SCCA Autocross days since they aren't legal for the stock class. So you're not stepping into a money pit, here.
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