AutoX is a waste of time. If you are not competitive (car has to be modded with in a class, or else you are running again some serious shit), you will do 2-3 40-60 second runs. F*** that S***.
Road racing on the other hand is the hot ticket to some serious track time, for very little cash. A day at auto X cost roughtly 40 bucks to register. For that you will probably run 5 sessions max, so that's 40 bucks for 5 minutes or about so. Most of the HPDE events I've attended run about 6 sessions of 20 minutes each. The group I run with charges 120 dollars per day. That's 2 hours for 120 dollars. You really get some serious seat time to find out what your car behaves like at the limit and past. Just make sure that you will pass the tech inspection, because if your car fails to tech in because of missing battery strap, there is no refund, and any track time you miss is not made up (ask me how I know)
Onto the cars themselves. Honestly, they are not as bad as some people make them out to be. Yeah, they are a bit sloppy, nor do they really like to do slalom style cornering on stock shocks and springs, but the chassis has a lot of potential. Ford had Sir Jackie Stewart (3 time F1 GP winner) come in and tune handling, so it's not all that bad. I did several track days on completely stock suspension and everything else. The idea is to learn how your car behaves when it's still slow, so you could maximize the potential of every part you install after. I found my car to be very easy to drive and very predictable. Here are some things I would like to stress before heading out to any track days. Make sure the car stops. Use an agressive pad if you can. I've got 99+ twin piston calipers and Hawks HP+, and that combination works excellent if you keep it under 110mph. Make sure the allignment is good. Get some camber catser plates from Maximum Motorsports (4 bolt ones, don't go cheap on these). Slam caster all the way to the back (5 degrees works good for me) and about degree and a half of negative camber. Lastly, I'd get an oil cooler, to keep the motor happy. Ford Racing makes a cheap kit, that should work.
. I use to think it looked kinda boring, but the more I see, the more I think it would be pretty fun. I'd like to get a couple of the basic, important things fixed and try it next spring. I don't know anything about the classes and what puts you where, but I'm going to research it later.
