I recently spent a pleasant Sunday in Rantoul, IL at the Champaign County Sports Car Club autocross with some engineers from the Advanced Powertrain Research Facility group of Argonne National Laboratory.  I’ll post about the distributed LabVIEW data acquisition (DAQ) system we’ve created for them in another post.  This entry is all about cars.

If you aren’t familiar with autocrossing, it is a sport where a small twisty track is setup in a parking lot or airstrip and cars do timed runs driving around it.  I was at the bottom of the pack on my last outing and I’m blaming my poor showing on the car I was driving.  I did the logical thing and bought a new BMW 135i last fall and have been itching to see if it would help my times.  The new car was a completely different driving experience and, by the end of the day, I was confident that I wasn't doing too bad for a novice.  I was still near the bottom of the pack but I’m happy to report that I wasn’t last.  I turned in better times than the guy in the Dodge Viper and I even got to take home the second place trophy in my particular novice category.