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GOLFMK7
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GOLFMKV

2015+ GTI for AutoX

GTICrazy90

Ready to race!
Location
chino hills, CA
When you guys started auto'xing did you get some instruction first?

I want to see if there's something like that available to learn proper techniques so I can at least know how I can improve, etc. I was struggling to find any though.
 

Evil Minion

Ready to race!
Location
Indianapolis
When you guys started auto'xing did you get some instruction first?

I want to see if there's something like that available to learn proper techniques so I can at least know how I can improve, etc. I was struggling to find any though.

Just sign up for any event. There's a Novice group at every one that new drivers are placed in, and they always have one of the experienced guys ride along with you. They will give you pointers after every run on where to improve and what you're doing well.
 

RacingManiac

Drag Race Newbie
Location
MI
Our region locally used to have a solo school at the beginning of the season. Format typically is like 10-15 runs day and you get an instructor who will ride along and maybe even drive your car to show you where it may go faster. We haven't had that for a few years though.

More nationally SCCA have a "Starting Line" Program which is usually organized with local region where they will send instructors and do an organized "school" for a day:

https://www.scca.com/pages/sl-autocross

It's not cheap but its actually decent value with what is included. I've volunteered for one and I feel like this school is great for absolute beginner since it has specific exercises for the more typical elements you will see at an event. And culminate in the end with a full course that will help you apply thing things you learned. Unfortunately I think most of the Starting Line School this season have already been completed. You have to wait til next year to see the schedule.

Another one not run through SCCA is the Evolution Driving School:
http://evoschool.com/

Similar idea, but I think this is more focused and can benefit from having SOME autocross experiences. Their schedule is on the site. They also run some smaller school in conjunction with the National Tour events in the area. I've taken the Phase One school and when I did it I've autocrossed for about 2 seasons on and off and I find that to be quite useful. Looks like quite a few California dates coming too.
 

IHazTurbo

Ready to race!
Location
Grand Rapids
Car(s)
2019 Golf R
Labor Day weekend I competed at the WMR SCCA Autocross at Grattan Raceway
I've never competed at a national event but I'm hoping to try my luck at it sometime in the next year or so. I've been doing this for about 12 years now a couple events a year. This was my first time at an actual track though.
Car is completely stock except for some 224/40/18 Continental ExtremeContact Sport tires. In the events I've done this year with WMR and Furrin group I've gotten 2nd at the DeltaPlex, 1st at Michigan's Adventure, 1st at GVSU, and 1st at Grattan. My brother races his ST in the same class, it feels good to put that car in it's place. My previous car was a semi-prepped MK6 GTI and I struggled to keep up with the ST's in the past.

Lots of room for improvement but figured I'd share some of my runs as well.

https://youtu.be/3Wl3WINgDWE <--Grattan winning run

https://youtu.be/A-htn4XvA_I <--GVSU winning run (lots of wind noise)
 

GTICrazy90

Ready to race!
Location
chino hills, CA
Our region locally used to have a solo school at the beginning of the season. Format typically is like 10-15 runs day and you get an instructor who will ride along and maybe even drive your car to show you where it may go faster. We haven't had that for a few years though.

More nationally SCCA have a "Starting Line" Program which is usually organized with local region where they will send instructors and do an organized "school" for a day:

https://www.scca.com/pages/sl-autocross

It's not cheap but its actually decent value with what is included. I've volunteered for one and I feel like this school is great for absolute beginner since it has specific exercises for the more typical elements you will see at an event. And culminate in the end with a full course that will help you apply thing things you learned. Unfortunately I think most of the Starting Line School this season have already been completed. You have to wait til next year to see the schedule.

Another one not run through SCCA is the Evolution Driving School:
http://evoschool.com/

Similar idea, but I think this is more focused and can benefit from having SOME autocross experiences. Their schedule is on the site. They also run some smaller school in conjunction with the National Tour events in the area. I've taken the Phase One school and when I did it I've autocrossed for about 2 seasons on and off and I find that to be quite useful. Looks like quite a few California dates coming too.

Thank you for the suggestions! When I didn't see any events for Starting Line, I thought it may have been cancelled. I was planning on waiting till next year anyway for budgeting reasons. I'll be sure to take a look towards the end of the year or the beginning to see when the schedule is up.
 

RacingManiac

Drag Race Newbie
Location
MI
Labor Day weekend I competed at the WMR SCCA Autocross at Grattan Raceway
I've never competed at a national event but I'm hoping to try my luck at it sometime in the next year or so. I've been doing this for about 12 years now a couple events a year. This was my first time at an actual track though.
Car is completely stock except for some 224/40/18 Continental ExtremeContact Sport tires. In the events I've done this year with WMR and Furrin group I've gotten 2nd at the DeltaPlex, 1st at Michigan's Adventure, 1st at GVSU, and 1st at Grattan. My brother races his ST in the same class, it feels good to put that car in it's place. My previous car was a semi-prepped MK6 GTI and I struggled to keep up with the ST's in the past.

Lots of room for improvement but figured I'd share some of my runs as well.

https://youtu.be/3Wl3WINgDWE <--Grattan winning run

https://youtu.be/A-htn4XvA_I <--GVSU winning run (lots of wind noise)


Wow the layout they used for the Grattan event changed from when I last run that.....

They used to start on top of Turn 3 and finish right after the last corner, so the front straight was not used at all....

I wish I can do this event but it conflicts now with travelling out to SCCA Nationals...
 

IHazTurbo

Ready to race!
Location
Grand Rapids
Car(s)
2019 Golf R
Wow the layout they used for the Grattan event changed from when I last run that.....

They used to start on top of Turn 3 and finish right after the last corner, so the front straight was not used at all....

I wish I can do this event but it conflicts now with travelling out to SCCA Nationals...

Yeah, I watched a few videos from prior events there because I wanted to see how the track was laid out, especially being my first time on the track. They said this was the first year they were running it this way and it appears as though most people liked it. The rain is the only thing that ruined the event for the last couple of heats. Out of 5 runs they both only had 2 or 3 dry runs.

I wish I could compete more in SCCA but being my daily driver I'm being a little cautious with the event frequency and travel.
 

dood.

Drag Racing Champion
Location
Seattle
Car(s)
2017 GTI S DSG


Saw this in the November edition of Sportscar Mag. Nice work RacingManiac! Only 0.2 off that pesky FoST. Looks like it was a competitive group, looking forward to videos.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
 

RacingManiac

Drag Race Newbie
Location
MI


Saw this in the November edition of Sportscar Mag. Nice work RacingManiac! Only 0.2 off that pesky FoST. Looks like it was a competitive group, looking forward to videos.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

Well that was Nats 2017. The car was working great and had to drive like hell to get there. If you have never been to Lincoln you probably won't know the OPR issue(Other People's Rubber). Having an entirely dry week(shocker) with 1300 cars autocrossing on 2 courses means there are a lot of rubber laid down. And despite them sweeping the courses with a street sweeper every night there are still lots out there. GS ran LAST heat of the last 2 days of the competition means we will have a lot of that. Too much in fact that we really weren't fully prepared for. Day one on the west course we had a very fast moving heat(we were barely getting 5 min between me and my codriver's run) with a tricky course means we were fighting a car that drove like there is an inch of rubber under the actual tires of the car(and there was!). 4th and 5th in GS after Day 1 and more than 8 tenth off the lead. My first run with the cleanest tire all afternoon on course ended up being what I stood on:



Day 2 on the East course we recruited other people from our region to help using a electric multitool to scrape the rear tires between every run. East course also runs slower for whatever reason and that helped giving us more time to do that. Fast sweepers and long corners played into GTI's strength in being able to get on power early and hard to use that diff to our advantage and it showed. I ran the fastest GS time of the day to get into 2nd place while my codriver unfortunately coned away a 3rd place run to end up in 4th in GS. Ultimately I was 0.205 off Doug Rowse, who has now earned 5 jackets to his name.



The time ultimately was good for 28th on PAX with the people that ran the same course order as me(around 330 people) and 172nd on PAX out of 1300 people. I am pretty happy with that. A better day one would probably help but hindsight is always 20/20 and we still drove our butts off with what we got.


Haha thanks, the pic above actually has myself and my codriver walking the course too....lol:D

Also most of the GS group I've raced all year, our local events are like tour events in GS every weekend....hah
 

SEAXR

New member
Location
Tampa, FL
I am glad the Pitt Match Tour had a handful of GTIs. I hope the owner of the STH GTI can fill us in on the prep level of the car. If not, maybe RacingManiac has some information. Jen, I was keeping up with the results on sololive, and I was hoping you and your codriver come out 1-2. Let us know some thoughts on the weekend.
 

RacingManiac

Drag Race Newbie
Location
MI
It was an interesting weekend. 2 years in a row being in late April where weather is basically a big lottery. I think they had 70s weather going in and 80s coming out and we had nothing but sub 40s weather and wet Saturday during the weekend. Coming in the week before it was forecasted mid-50s and dry so I stuck with my old BFGs from last year with pretty worn tread and saving the fresh set for later in the season. Turns out to be my first wrong tire call for the weekend. GS runs first heat and it was raining for our head with temp in the low 40s and dropping. Both me and my codriver struggled on grip both in terms of dynamic behavior of the car and the stability control/traction control trying to drive the car in ESC Sport. We were one of the 2 cars in GS with BFG and probably the one with the least treaded BFGs in the entire event. In hindsight it would've been smart I think to change to my DD Continental ECS and ran that instead. Probably would've put us in better position in the afternoon to make some difference in the standing. The CS leader at the time ran on PSSs. That was my 2nd dumb tire call of the weekend. As it were both of us were at the tail end of the trophies/non trophies.

Afternoon at least it dried out and got slightly warmer. PittRace surface is pretty low grip asphalt with 2 different pavement transitions so overall grip level isn't dramatically higher and lack of tire temp still isn't something the car likes. But at least it won't pull power as much and VAQ is doing more work. I think our times were ok in the afternoon but still pretty far off the leader(both were on much fresher Bridgestones). George Modlin's GTI was doing well and probably helps his rear bar isn't the 26mm H&R in this condition. We were doing a lot with pressure to help balance the car. My codriver got a good run together to get into 49.7s and jumped me. I never got a run I liked in the afternoon and that sorta sealed my fate.

Sunday challenge qualifier was 30s and dry with some flurries in the air(see the theme here). We were still struggling but at least we are used to the course. They were trying to hurry through the cars so we got less time between drivers, which actually helps to get some semblance of tire temperature and both myself and codriver got our best runs in the last run. Mine was improvement over the day before although I did have a better raw time on Sat. I tried some different lines through the course after looking at the data and seems to paid off a little bit.

Challenge runs are pretty dumb since that were the warmest the weekend has been and being able to do back to back runs at least for the 1st round means for the first time I had some warm tires and the car was 6 tenth faster than I ran all weekend. Still not at the GS winner level but I think it was a least better. I made it to the final for our heat and got knocked out by a DS car.

All in all pretty fruitless weekend but at least got the season going. Next national event will probably be the newly scheduled Peru Champ Tour in June, that should be warm...

Saturday runs: https://youtu.be/1Q7iy9dU1CA

Sunday qualifier: https://youtu.be/6J6bO8NUVYQ

Codriver Saturday: https://youtu.be/VsAR21LipX0

Codriver Sunday qualifier: https://youtu.be/UrtMCpn-qP4
 

RacingManiac

Drag Race Newbie
Location
MI
The MK6 GTI in STH is from Canada. It was running on Dunlops of all things and seems to be well driven(probably not a terrible tire for the condition). Only think I know is that it is a manual car and it was running on I think VW Motorsport wheels, so 18s. STH ran 3rd heat and they definitely had the best morning condition for Saturday(it was sunny for a tiny bit too).
 

Vince 49

New member
Location
Springfield, VA
Thank you RacingManiac

I recently began running a 2015 MkVII 2-door base with 6sp MT and the performance package in GS. Other than the abrupt change in power from the turbo, I like how the car works. The one thing I wasn't sure of was what was the best way to minimize the nannies. I tried ASR Off which is fine for launch, but intrusive around the course. ESC sport does something at launch, but seems to be the least intrusive everywhere else. I came to the site today to ask if there is a better solution. However, when I read that RacingManiac uses ESC Sport and I know how competitive he is nationally, that answers that question.

For reference, I'm running an 034MotorSport rear bar with spherical bearing links, the OEM shocks set to Sport, and RE-71Rs. I actually bought a set of Koni yellows with custom valving and external adjusters for the rears. However, the balance with the 034 bar and the OEM shocks is much better than I expected. I prefer a car that has slight oversteer in steady state and slight understeer in transients. I realize that won't suit everybody.

Lastly, does anybody know if a 2015 MkVII base can have its infotainment updated to show the Performance Monitor?

If I can ever become one with the car, maybe I'll see RacingManiac on course sometime.
 

RacingManiac

Drag Race Newbie
Location
MI
Welcome, hope to see you out there sometimes.

I haven't seen anything that updated the infotainment to have Performance Monitor enabled for 2016, I don't know if its possible for 2015...
 
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