@Dave_W I would be interested in what you think of the course design for this one.
A slalom on a curve is always going to be tricky because you're not getting into an even, balanced rhythm. Instead of turning the same amount in two directions (R-L-R-L), you're turning more and less amounts in the same direction (RIGHT-right-RIGHT-right or R-Straight-R-S). So it's going to feel wierd from the start. Add to that the uneven spacing / pointer directions they had (R-R-L-R-L-L-R) and there's no rhythm at all. So everything you're used to about driving "normal" slaloms goes out the window.
Generally, I'd call this a "technical" course. There are traps that can catch you out if you're not using good technique - looking ahead, picking the correct line through multiple gates / elements, trading off one corner for another, painting outside the lines, etc. I was brought up with a local club that often does "technical" courses, so I'm used to them. For instance, I always pace out the distance between each cone in a slalom because some evil course designers will space them tighter or looser as you get into them, and not knowing that means you're mowing down the last couple cones because you got behind, or left time on course because you didn't accelerate through the slalom. I'll also sight down the line of slalom cones to see if any are just a bit off center. If you have a club that usually does "straight-forward" course designs and then they do one "technical" course, you'll usually see a much larger gap between the experienced drivers and novices for that event. You may even see a big difference in the lines taken by the experienced drivers and the novices.
Watching the video, I found myself doing two main things -
1) Really look ahead. I was usually trying to see 4 slalom cones ahead. In a normal slalom, you can get away with looking only 2 cones ahead because you know which side the car needs to be on each cone. Looking ahead is just fine-tuning your arcs through the slalom. But with this course, there wasn't a guarantee which side the car was supposed to be on each cone. So you're looking ahead to determine major side-to-side moves of the car, which needs a lot more time to happen, so you need to be looking a lot further ahead to have that time.
2) I'm ignoring the upright cones and concentrating on the pointers. It's the pointer cones that are most important, because they're telling you if you need to move the car a whole car width one way or the other, or if you can keep it straight (and if you can accelerate or have to decelerate). I try to pare down to the bare minimum what I need look at to determine the course (mentally filter out the "sea of cones"), and with this course it's the pointers.
It kind of goes back to my theory that you should never feel surprised when driving the course. If you do, you're not looking / thinking far enough ahead. And maybe need more course walks.
Which reminds me that you mentioned they changed the course after the walks. If the changes affected the line, I probably would have allowed drivers to take one quick walk to see the changes. But if they just changed a slalom "cone" from a pointer and one upright to a pointer and two uprights, that's not changing the line - it's just making it a bigger penalty to hit. I still would have mentioned it at the safety (driver's) meeting, though.
The other thing I noticed more with Ashley is that she could have gotten more to the left before the Chicago box to open up the entry to it, instead of coming at it from "behind" it.
I'm not sure any of this helps you, as I think you know it already. I guess the other thing is that everybody will at some time find a course that's just not their cup of tea. I've had events where the whole day I'm thinking, "I don't know why I'm so slow today." And then the next event I'm back to normal. Blame it on the phase of the moon and put it behind you.