November 9, 2002 in Ocala, Florida

After 7 years of involvement with sports car clubs and autocrossing, I finally got to attend one of these "Funcana" events. (for the curious, the proper spelling should be "Fun Khana" as it is a derivative of "gymkhana", a term used in the 60's for what we now call "autocross") As a bonus, Alex actually got to "navigate" for me during this event, and he really enjoyed it. We had so much fun, we did it twice!

The general idea of a funcana is to have a lot of fun doing some of the silliest things you can think of to do with a car. All of the events are designed to be very low speed, so safety concerns are minimal compared to a regular autocross. This particular Funcana had 6 stations as indicated on the layout map below.

I would highly recommend this type of event to any car club as an occasional fun thing to do!

The first station was the Blind Drive. Goal: Best time without running over cones.
If you've never driven a car with a blindfold on, it's a bizarre feeling! The course was a very exaggerated slalom set up on the grass. It required full-lock turns to navigate it, which actually made it easier for the driver as the only instructions you needed from your navigator were "left", "right", "straight" and perhaps "stop". Alex and I did okay with this one, especially after Alex started getting the rythm of it. It's all about timing and keeping the driver's inputs ahead of the course, just like driving a regular slalom.

The next station was the Furbie Frenzy. Goal: Best time without dropping Furbies or running over cones.
This one was another sort of big offset slalom using 3' tall cones with little platforms on top of them. The catch was that you had to be close enough to each cone for your navigator to reach out and grab a Furbie from the top of the cone without dropping it. You couldn't really do it without stopping at each cone. When you got to the end, the last cone had a horn for you to honk, and then you had to go in reverse and revisit each cone again to replace the Furbie. This one was quite challenging for us because Alex's arms are so short I had to get REALLY close to the cones. Traction on the grass was pretty limited, too. :)

The third station was the Roto Route. Goal: Best time without dragging the monkey.
In the center was a pole with about 15' of rope secured to it. On the other end of the rope, a suction cup was secured to your windshield. In the middle of the rope hung a poor little stuffed monkey. Your mission was to drive two complete circles without dragging the monkey or popping the suction cup off of your windshield. This one was quite simple and I found it to be very easy in my car. Might have been more of a challenge in a Miata with power steering and a bouncy stock suspension. This was one of two events that Alex and I won.

Fourth up was the Big Plunge. Goal: Collect as many plates as possible in 2 minutes without breaking any.
Blue plates and yellow plates are scattered around the parking lot. (their spots are marked so that each competitor has the same set) The navigator is given a fresh toilet plunger and the driver is instructed to drive to the plates so that the navigator can pick them up. This is another one that we had a little trouble with because Alex has short arms, but it was still a lot of fun and we did pretty well. Blue plates were worth 2 points, Yellow plates 1 point, so we collected blue plates only on our second attempt. Lucky for us, the plates proved to be pretty durable... as you can see, I ran over a couple!

The fifth station was called Smoothie. Goal: Best time without dropping any balls.
With nine little whiffle balls in a neat little tray suction cupped to your hood, the driver had to navigate a tight series of S turns without losing any of the balls. Smoothness was the key. Some testing to see how much it would take to disturb the balls would have been helpful. A stock suspension that would dampen abrupt movements would also be a benefit here. I'm not sure how we compared to others, but we didn't win this one.

The final station was the Big Slalom. Goal: Best time without knocking over cups or cones.
This one was essentially an obscenely tight (mostly idling in 1st gear, except for the start... and the part where you have to back up!) and short autocross course with a few twists. The start was straight for about 50'. The catch there was that you had to place the left side of your car such that the tires went between parellel rows of little paper cups full of water for about 20'. Not a problem if you had a good idea where your tires are and got lined up correctly. We got through there without hitting any cups both times. After that was some tight maneuvering leading to a box that you could choose to go into either forward or backward as long as you or your passenger could honk the horn mounted on one of the cones inside the box. We chose to enter the box forward and back out of it. After that was a quick turn-around and a long slalom. The slalom was so tight that you couldn't accelerate beyond idling in first gear. The best you could hope for was to keep up with steering through it without having to use the brakes! I'm not sure what they deducted for cones, but we hit the first cone in the slalom both times. In spite of that, this was the other event that we won.

After it was all over, everyone was hungry. So, of course, most of us went out and grabbed a bite. What would a Miata club event be without food?