Over the weekend, our very own Jon Pomrenke took a slightly modified STI to the second tier of the podium at the 2009 Farmington, NM National Tour. Jon is an avid autocross driver and competes on a regular basis here in Salt Lake City as well as around the Southwest. While he was not at the helm of one of our shop cars, this STI was equipped with an array of COBB Tuning go-fast parts including an AccessPORT with a custom STU map. Read Jon’s tale of cone-dodging below. If you need any advice on Autocross setup or pointers, give COBB Tuning a call.

We ran Farmington in a 2006 STI. This was the first full event I’d  driven that car, having dabbled in it a few times before. The weekend prior I did some comparison runs by running COBB’s 2008 STI in the morning, followed by the 2006 STI in the afternoon.

We went to Farmington on a new set of tires we had never driven on; shaved Bridgestone RE-11s. The different tires need a different suspension setup so we spent all of the test-n-tune trying to dial out
understeer. Lacking the resources to make a drastic suspension change, we had to run with the understeer.

With little seat time in the car, I ran a very conservative first run to ensure I had a clean time to stand on. I then followed it by an aggressive second run, cutting 1 second off my time but clipping a cone.
My third run matched the second one, but was wreckless and dirty once again. I stood on my first run Saturday and entered Sunday in 4th place, roughly .9-seconds behind the leader. If cones weren’t a factor, I had the fastest and third-fastest scratch times in STU for Saturday.

I changed my strategy Sunday and ran an aggressive first run to ensure I wouldn’t be so far behind if I stood on my first run. I catapulted up into 2nd place- others were fighting cones. For my second run I cleaned up some sections but coned. I knew all I needed to do was fix the Chicago boxes, and the sweeper following them, and I could find another .5-second. I took care not to change any other sections of the course and focused on cleaning up those boxes. Sure enough, my last run was like my second, but with better lines through the boxes. I narrowed the 1st-2nd lead to .237-seconds.

The competition in STU was the strongest of all the classes with any of five different drivers capable of winning. The courses were a mixture of tight and technical, both days being very cone intensive. A few of the drivers fought cones all weekend. Without cones, the STI would have had the lead by .009-seconds. With the cones, the STI trailed by .237-seconds.

Car Specs:
2006 Subaru STI
COBB SS 3-inch Turbo-Back Exhaust
AccessPORT, custom STU map
AST 4200 Coil-overs
COBB Tubular Anti Swaybars, front and rear
COBB Adjustable Rear Mount
COBB Knob
Kosei K1-TS 17×9-inches
Bridgestone RE-11 245/40-R17
Sparco Evo seats