Forum Replies Created
-
Posts
-
Hmm… I don’t remember hitting anything on my second run, but it doesn’t affect my class rank either way.
The only water bottle I saw was a half-empty store-bought imported tap water (Voss) bottle. I’m pretty sure that’s in the recycling bin by now, but I suppose I could dig it out.
I think I see a couple of spots where there’s not a lot time to be gained, but a lot to be lost.
I notice, too, that the map now includes hardware locations and some braking zone markers.
I’ll add my testimonial.
Dana and I (along with several other GGC members) attended Phase 1 and 2 last weekend. Today, we autocrossed with the PCA. As often happens, it was a re-run of a previous GGC AX course. Using what I learned in Evo school, I knocked over 3 seconds off my previous best time on that course. YMMV.
The Evo school is coming back to the area in November—the same weekend as our chapter’s Thunderhill HPDE, in fact. If you’re not going to attend the latter and are serious about improving your AX chops, I heartily recommend it.
Well, that was a pathetic performance on my part. Looks like last month was a fluke for me after all.
Looks like there’s a little trap for the unwary in the middle of that slalom.
It’ll be interesting to see if my decent showing last month was just a fluke.
Here’s a link to a video of my fastest run. I hesitate to say that it’s my best. I don’t hear happy tire noises in enough places and I’m a good car width or more wide of a key apex, but there it is.
@Jack: I had spotted the three “sneaky straights” on my own, but both you and Brian pointed out to me where I could get hard on the throttle even before the actual straight part for a couple of them. My main problems with this course were not keeping the lines tight and slowing too much for many of the turns (a constant problem for me), which you and Brian also called me on. Still, I did better than I had expected (though not as well as I would’ve liked), in no small part thanks to Brian’s and your coaching.
@Jeff: I’m with you. Of the GGC AX courses I’ve driven so far this season, this is my candidate for the rewind. I thought it was really cool how one could see the straight sections simply appear up ahead almost out of nowhere when the car was lined up correctly.
Are the slalom entry and exit really meant to be offset from each other by twenty feet like that? Seems a bit weird.
Before you completely come off the accelerator you can already feel the car slowing down… It took some getting used to but I imagine it helps to extend the range. A little EV like this is truly a momentum car. Wasting energy to heating the brakes and rotors is the last thing you want to do.
Regenerative braking in action. All EVs do this nowadays, but the i3 had the strongest effect I’ve felt so far. When you come off the pedal, the wheels become generators that recharge the batteries. Takes some work to push those electrons around, so the car slows down. The Exploratorium used to have a simple exhibit that illustrated this: A stationary bike driving a generator hooked up to a series of big floodlights. Felt like you were freewheeling with everything turned off, but as you turned more lights on, the bike got progressively harder to pedal.
It’s not only EVs that take advantage of this effect. Conventionally-powered BMWs also have regenerative braking, but it only kicks in when you’re actively on the brake pedal. It’d interfere with the new “automatic coasting mode” otherwise 😉 The idea in this case is to reduce demand for electrical power generation on the engine and thus increase fuel efficiency by some (likely miniscule) amount.
I test-drove an i3 yesterday as part of BMW’s “Drive the Future Now” campaign. Interesting car, though I’m not quite sure of the target market. It’s certainly roomy enough inside for passengers. I hopped in the back seat while my father-in-law was taking his turn, and while there’s no way that I was going to stretch out back there, there was enough headroom and leg room for me that I wasn’t uncomfortable. Getting in and out is a bit tricky because of the rear half-door, similar to that on some Minis, but manageable. Not much in the way of cargo space, though. You can fit a couple of grocery bags into the rear compartment. There’s also a small storage space under the hood, but that’s usually going to be full of charging accessories. The split rear seat does fold down to increase the cargo space, but you’re still not going to get anything substantial into these cars. I can see using an i3 for short-to-moderate distance commuting, tooling around town and light errands, but not for serious shopping. The view through the rear view mirror was a bit constricted, mostly by the rear headrests, but that’s about par for the course for me these days—I’m still driving ’80’s BMWs with their panoramic views 🙂
The car sits a lot higher than I’m used to. It was buffeted quite a bit by yesterday’s winds. The steering felt very twitchy to both me and my father-in-law, and there doesn’t seem to be any way to adjust the steering response as there is on, say, a Tesla. We also hated the curved driver’s-side mirror, but these were Euro models that were being used for this campaign. The U.S. version will have the more usual flat mirror. “Throttle” response was quite peppy, even at freeway speeds. The brakes bit very hard, which took some getting used to, but between the light weight of the car and the regenerative braking, you almost don’t have to use them to bring the car to a full stop from city speeds. My father-in-law also noted that the i3 didn’t have the “creep” that he’d experienced in both a Leaf and his Tesla Model S.
The controls were pretty straightforward and easy to understand, being for the most part contemporary BMW standard. The gear selector was a bit awkward, though, both in placement and function. Other electric cars I’ve seen have done a better job with that.
As an amusing side note, as we were heading out onto 237, we spotted the car that had gone out a few minutes ahead of us in the ditch at the last right-hand turn before the road turns into 237 proper. According to one of the BMW reps I asked about this later, the “idiot” tried to take that turn at over 40 MPH barely a couple of minutes into his drive. Besides the campaign swag, this driver got to take home a damage report form for his insurance company. Reminded me of that other idiot who crashed an M6 during last year’s Ofest test drives.