I was just talking about this with someone else. I love track events, and I love autocross. Track days are few and far between for me (and even then, I’m only doing the NYSpeed events because I can’t afford to do a full out REAL track day at this point).
In the meantime, hitting up autocrosses means I still get seat time, within my budget. Seat time is seat time, and if it costs me some tires over a year, and $20 per event, I’d rather do that then getting couch seat time. Sure, I could save up that money and be closer to the goal of getting to a real track day… but that’s one or two days out of a year… it’s not enough to satisfy my driving addiction. I’m not going to snub my nose at autocrossing because it’s not 30-minute at a time seat time.