Originally posted by sjs:
I don't see it that way. Learning fast is great, while you're learning, but I've been on a lot of autocross courses and with a regular car (as opposed to a cart or small formula) there is precious little room for finding a clean, fast, smooth line compared to a poor one. Personally, I see very little transfer between (solo 2 style) autocross and full track road racing for someone already even reasonably good at the latter.
Let me try again to explain what I mean. General driving skills like car control, looking ahead, thinking ahead, putting the car *exactly* where you want it, heel/toe downshifting, being smooth on the inputs, etc, are shared between autocross and track driving. Some of those things, however, are MUCH more challenging on an autocross course. For example, Road America is 14 turns in 4.x miles, at like 3 minutes a lap. Your average autocross course is probably 20+ turns in well under a mile at 40-60 seconds per run. The pace at which your brain needs to keep up and analyze what's going on at an autocross is much, much faster than doing simple lapping days or time trials. (NOTE: I do understand that wheel-to-wheel racing puts all kinds of new demands on your brain that have nothing to do with anything you'll see at an autocross, however, I'm not talking about wheel-to-wheel racing, but as far as I know, Chris doesn't do any wheel-to-wheel racing either, and I was responding to his post)
Also, I can't speak for your autocross courses, but the ones we run on (we've got a couple designers who regularly design courses for national-level events), are usually very technical, and leave a LOT of room for taking a good line versus a bad one, which makes all the difference in the world. I've also had instructors who do road racing, and have said that the people who started with autocross end up better road racers (because of the mental conditioning needed to get GOOD at autocross, not just competent, mind you, but GOOD).
I also can't speak for your driving skills, or those of people you've seen autocrossing. However, in my region, it's not uncommon for someone who is by all accounts an above-average driver to post an above-average time, and then still have someone else, who is a VERY good autocross driver come along and beat that person by 1 or 2 seconds (out of 40-60) in the same car, because they drove it better.
-Mike
[This message has been edited by grippgoat (edited 28 November 2001).]