Your humble author has usually struggled as a National Solo driver, but I’m not ashamed of losing to these guys; some of them are the finest technical drivers in the world and even the worst National Solo driver is usually pretty decent. If you’ve ever wondered how you would stack up, now’s the time to find out.

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Earlier this year when it seemed that a price war could be brewing in the US market, one of TTAC’s industry sources noted that the problem wasn’t strictly a question of business competition. Speaking on background, the source told us that

when speaking with old friends at Ford and GM, the level of mutual distaste for each other is very high…it seems to be getting personal. Lots of egos involved, [which] increases potential for short-sighted decision-making

At the time, I was willing to chalk up this animosity to the usual industry hyper-competitiveness (or at least a return to form after the lockstep mutual support of the bailout era), but it seems I should have paid more attention to our source’s concerns. As it turns out, the bad feelings between Detroit’s cross-town rivals has apparently gotten worse…

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Are those people wasting their time, or do they provide the necessary base for the racing pyramid? This question was asked by a reader in my recent piece about racing an ARCA Tempo, and I think it’s worth discussing for a moment despite the fact that autocross-related articles have consumed enough electrons on the ‘Net to cause jealousy among the folks who operate the Large Hadron Collider.

I will start off by freely admitting that autocross is an area where I do not particularly excel as a driver. In the right car, on the right track, I’m nearly as fast as anyone in the business and I have the track records and wins to prove it. In my single season of National-level SCCA autocross, however, I finished slightly above midpack in three Tour events and almost exactly midpack in the Solo Nationals PAX Index. My modest gift as a driver is a willingness to accept a little bit of danger, which means I frequently find a little more velocity in high-speed corners around racetracks. In autocross, that’s a useless skill. My weakness as a driver is temper, which makes me a solid passer but absolutely abysmal third-run autocrosser.

Since I’m the closest thing TTAC (or nearly anybody else in the autoblogging world) has to a National-level cone-chaser, however, I’ll talk a bit about what autocross is and what it is not.
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