Short answer is slow down the steering wheel inputs and start setting up for obstacles sooner.

I always knew that I was supposed to setup sooner, but those words never made the mental jump into something concrete that I could do in the car and know it was working. By making the effort to slow my wheel inputs I am forced to set up sooner because I can't just rush in and crank the wheel over.

The Miata's much stiffer front end can be thanked for teaching me this. At the champs, especially in slaloms and other quick transitions, I'd crank the wheel over and the front end would skate for about 12-18 inches then stick. When I asked Jon Roberts about it, he gave me the advice to slow down on the steering wheel.

The reasoning is that with a more stiffly suspended front end, my steering inputs get translated to the rubber more quickly. On the Subaru (and even with the Miata on stock suspension) I could crank the steering wheel around and the tire wouldn't get loaded up until the suspension caught up with what I was doing.

There was also some advice from Danny Shields during the novice walkthrough (I went back to Kindergarten this weekend) that was really valuable to me. He said that autocross is a precision driving competition, and that you know when you're pushing too hard by the fact that you aren't able to place the car exactly where you want to anymore. It's one of those things that kind of makes you say duh, but it never really surfaced in my mind as a yardstick for measuring if I'm pushing too hard. That really transformed the way that I drove the course. My focus became to hit my marks at speed rather than to just try and go as fast as possible.

Another thing I learned this weekend that will be difficult to put into practice at the events I run is that course walking is far more important than I had realized. I walked that course three times and then again with Danny in the novice walkthrough. It was nothing to close my eyes and mentally drive the course. I can't remember the last time I've been able to do that.

I made zero changes to the car and went from last weekend being 5.2 PAX seconds back from Danny to this weekend being 0.46 PAX seconds back. I am VERY happy with the results.