Saturday, April 26th, was an Autocross school for thirty lucky students at a concrete ex-military airfield in Grenada, MS. The teacher was none other than Mississippi native and 11-time national champion John Thomas! Talk about quality training! We started with a two-hour classroom session, with John and two of our senior members talking theory and strategy. We then went out and started driving. We had three small courses set up, with each one covering differrent features of a typical autocross course. John Thomas, Jim Bishop (our R.E) and Ricky Ricks split the class of 30 into groups of ten. We rotated through the courses, taking turns driving, riding, observing and critiqueing each other. Some lucky ones even had John drive them around his course in their own cars! Saturday night included a great meal and full story-telling session at Jake & Rips Restaurant and Pub in Grenada.
Sunday was a beautiful day for autocross with full sunshine and temps around 80F. The three smaller courses from Saturday were incorporated with some new sections to form a fabulous autocross course. The recycled sections were run backwards from Saturday to make it more interesting of course! We were happy to see quite a few Novices at the event, along with a few 'crossers who'd been missing recently. We had 56 drivers, including 24 novices. Everyone got 6 runs in well-run event that saw over 350 runs in 4 hours! The Open Class winner and FTD driver (no surprise!) was John Thomas in Chris Cornett's Street Prepared BMW 325is. John was followed closely by Lance Coley in an STS Nissan 240SX and Richard Holden in a Prepared Datsun 280Z. Street Tire Class was Don Johnson (HS Ford Focus), John Smith (SS Viper!) and Grant Green (BS Honda S2000). The big surprise was Novice Class winner (and novice for the last time!) Teddy Gibson in his GS BMW 318ti with a time that would have won Street Tire Class or taken 7th in Open Class. Jeff Walin in an HS Protege and Nick Conklin in a DSP Sentra Spec-V battled it out for 2nd and 3rd in Novice. Holly Thomas took the honors in Ladies Class in a BMW 325is.
The weekend was a great success, with the Thomas's going the extra mile to help their old friends in Mississippi (John's job recently moved them to central Florida). Special thanks are also due to John Green for facilitating our club's return to Grenada, to all the MSSCCA club members that put the weekend together, to the Timing & Scoring team of Cheryl Ricks and Kim Shumaker, and to all the participants/volunteers who made the weekend a success!