PittRace track night yesterday. First real event of the season; new wheels, tires, swaybars, and brakes; a track I've driven once before three years ago in a completely different car. And the first real trip with the trailer...what could possibly go wrong?
Loaded up and ready to go monday night, whole thing stuffed into the garage:
Accidentally got a late start, but otherwise the trip was uneventful. Trailer is noisy as it bounces around but otherwise no real indication it was there. Not wanting to flip it over or grenade the wheel bearings forced me to drive responsibly which meant no making up for lost time but also meant that I averaged almost 27mpg at 73-75mph.
And arrived:
Registered, teched, then got to tearing the car apart to swap tires. As I said I haven't driven this track in forever, so I hopped out for a few paced laps with the novices to try to remember the track and feel out the car a little. Between still working on remembering what I was doing and missing on tire pressures, both the car any myself were kind of a mess in the first session, which then got cut short by a car breaking and dumping some oil in the last corner. By the second session I had gotten myself close enough to knowing what I was doing and the tire pressures close enough to right to get a sense of what was happening. I actually ended up softening the already soft-ish rear bar to calm the rear down. It honestly probably could have been faster as it was but was much more confidence inspiring with the rear more planted, even if it was getting a bit of on throttle understeer in a couple of places. With the stiff front bar the car really likes to be trail braked, which is a skill I've been working on as well. That probably also explains why the rear bar wanted to be softer, especially since this track is full of corners with apexes at the crst of a hill. I learned that the low fuel warning seems to come with a slight reduction in redline, so I know now not to start a session with less than a half tank of fuel. By the last session both the car and myself were feeling pretty good. The brakes had been a little weird early on and I was concerned that I was working on boiling the fluid but I think they just needed more break-in than I had given them and they felt good and consistent. The front tires still hadn't stabilized on pressure and ended up a bit higher than I wanted and the front end started to struggle some towards the end.
Here's the video of my best laps:
First lap I let a slightly faster mustang past and then used that as motivation to keep up with him. That trip through the first section of esses was my best of the night by half a second before we caught up to traffic. Lap two had traffic at the start and a missed apex coming onto the back straight but was otherwise basically identical to lap 3, my fastest at a 2:00.3. By the third lap either I was pushing too hard or the front tires were just unhappy and the esses suffered for it. Seems like there should be at least a few seconds in it between being more familiar with the track, a bit more setup tweaking, and generally having some more confidence in the car (...and not having to shift at 7k rpm) which would put me more or less in line with the pace of the S2 winner from the '19 TT event which I feel pretty good about.
Event over, swapped tires, packed up and ready to leave. Surprisingly good lighting, plus a bonus matching GT4 in the background:
The drive home was equally uneventful aside from the brakes now being fully LOUD. Rolling into my neighborhood at around 1130pm I felt bad every time I had to touch the brake pedal. Ended up basically coasting into my driveway in an effort to not wake up the entire neighborhood.