Autocross to Win (DG's Autocross Secrets): The art and science of developing autocross cars

by Dennis Grant

Dennis Grant, the "Street Modified Godfather", built an SCCA ProSolo Championship and FIA Canadian National Championship winning autocross car. This book describes the tricks, secrets, and engineering details he learned during his racing career. Equally applicable to road racers, rally cars, circle track cars, and high performance street cars, this book is full of information on how to make cars handle at the extreme limits of performance. Includes chapters on tuning suspensions, building shocks, and selecting tires - and much, much more! Whether you are just starting out building a high-performance car, or a grizzled veteran of motorsports, this book is full of insightful (and occasionally funny) observations on what it takes to tune the car and driver system in order to win races. Contains theory and practical advice as well. Written very much in the idiom of the legendary Carroll Smith's ...to Win series, this book is an essential addition to the bookshelf of any automotive enthusiast.

181 pages, Paperback

Published June 4, 2017

About the author

Dennis Grant arrived on the SCCA Autocross scene in 1997 and immediately progressed to National level ProSolo. An early adopter of social media, he recorded his racing exploits on the Talon Digest, building a small following of well-wishers. Riding the "import racing" boom of the late 1990s, he helped the SCCA reach out to this demographic through his creation of the Street Modified class of highly modified production-based cars, and then he joined the class himself. Forced to learn racing engineering in order to become competitive, he documented his experience on the Autocross to Win website so that future would-be engineers wouldn't have to learn from scratch the way he did. Eventually, he turned A2W into a book.

After winning several National-level championships, Dennis retired from racing and returned to military service, but he still dabbles in engineering and cars in his spare time, documented on an intermittently updated Far North Racing YouTube channel. He lives in New Brunswick with his wife of 26 years and her asshole dog.

In 2022, he wrote a new book, "The Hobbyist's Guide to CNC", capturing his experience building and working with small-scale CNC machines, specifically to help people with no prior manufacturing or machining experience learn to operate hobby-scale gantry routers, lasercutters, mills and lathes.

Reviews

[Jacob Hunt · Rating 4 out of 5]

It’s Complicated!

This is an excellent book to help you understand how you can understand what your car is going to do in the track.!
It’s definitely not for a beginner autocrosser.