A new Focus ST is sort of cheap; are they fun to Autocross?

In reply to JoeTR6 :

Thanks!

I found one company making a wide gas pedal.  Or maybe I'll fab something myself.

USERNAMETAKEN said:

Armitage said:

I haven't taken mine to an AutoX yet but I have ridden in others. I was pretty impressed with how well the stock car (with an ECU tune) did even with a ham-fisted driver on all seasons. I'm attending the Octane Academy on Monday so I'll have some firsthand AutoX and track experience to report back on shortly.

How was Octane Academy???  Worth a road trip to Arizona?

Welcome to the club! The color looks awesome. 

For a free program, the Octane Academy was great. It starts out with a meet and greet dinner the night before and a 30 minute classroom session the morning of the event. Then they get you out to the track and split the participants in half. One half drives, the other half watches. Starts with lead-follow, then instructed and solo laps. If you're a seasoned track vet, this may not scratch your normal race/hpde itch, but it's fun to beat on someone else's car for free and drive on a new track with a breathtaking backdrop of snow-capped mountains in every direction. There are a lot of first timers on the track and there is no passing so it pretty much went like this: give the car in front of me a 30 second start, exit the pit, drive hard until I catch the novice, pit in, repeat. The afternoon involves handbrake exercises and autox techniques, culminating in a timed competition on their "UrbanX" course (basically an autox that starts off with a handbrake 180 turn and ends with a handbrake 90 stop in a coned box with normal slalom, figure 8, etc. stuff in the middle). If you've got a free weekend and better yet, it's within driving range I can't think of any reason not to.

Was reading thru the ST manual today, and it listed the gear ratios and final drive.  It said that 5th and 6th (and also reverse) have a different lower final drive ratio.  Huh?

Anyone have an idea of what's going on there?  I suppose there's no reason those gears couldn't mesh with a different final drive, but I've never heard of such a thing.  Fascinating, this little car.