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build diary August 22, 2005: Another track day has come and gone. The track day was part of our Open House at Flyin' Miata, so I wasn't able to play all day. By the time I made it out to the track at noon, my fast time from a few days earlier had fallen. I did have the advantage of my new tires, though. Unfortunately, the first laps didn't show any improvement. Sure, I was under 1:07 consistently wheras I'd only dropped below that point on two laps before, but I'd been hoping for a big drop. The car was oversteering and a quick check of the tread showed that I wasn't using the edges of the rear tires. I dropped my rear pressures by a couple of pounds and the fronts by one. The pressures I were running were an educated guess based on what I'd run on the Azenis. The second time out, times came down a bit. I knocked a half second off my time and was starting to explore the limits of the braking. The brakes don't bite very hard and take a firm push to get maximum retardation. I might experiment with pads a bit to get an intial bite back again. I might even try a set of Wilwood calipers on a custom bracket if I get really creative. But for the track day, I was stuck with what I had. I took a couple of passengers out in the slower groups. This was partly to give them some thrills and also to keep the tires hot. I quickly remembered that the car had been set up for one person and not two - the Supertrapp tip scraped on all right turns and the car felt very different in balance. Still, I was able to have some fun. By the time my third and final timed session rolled around, I'd learned that I had to be fairly aggressive to get the tires and brakes hot in the short warmup. We were being sent out on a 0.9 mile track, given one warmup lap, three timed laps and then a cooldown. Not a lot of time for a 1300 lb car to get a set of 205-series race tires up to temperature! My last session was a little ragged with one mistake that cost me a good lap. Still, I hit the rev limiter at one spot in the track on two laps where I'd never hit it before. I was obviously getting faster corner exit speeds. To go much faster on this track, I really need a slightly taller rear end as the straights are too short to bother shifting. Either that or I'll raise the rev limiter past the current 7500. I should have put in good springs when I had the head off! Anyhow, despite my fairly aggressive and choppy driving on my "fast laps" I managed to pull off a 1:05.585 with a 1:05.763 to back it up. That was the fastest of the day by 0.674 seconds. There's a video of what I think is the fastest lap. One of my competitors - the coworker who drove the Seven earlier in the week - had a fairly big off in his turbo Miata and wasn't able to put down any fast times. He did the same thing he'd done in the Seven and went straight on turn one (now renamed the "Ferber straight" in his honor). At least he'd been able to gather up the Seven, the Miata ended up in the dirt faaaar away from the track. Everything was unharmed, it just took a lot of time to yank it out. Another coworker took the Seven out in a slow group and had a hard time with traffic, but he certainly enjoyed the oversteer abilities of the car. I was worried about him - he had the potential to go faster than I had! The car behaved almost perfectly over the course of the day. On the first session, one of my front fender stays broke and let the front fender flop around. A bit of duct tape solved that problem. The suspension proved well up to dealing with some hard berm hits without upsetting the car too much but still cornered pretty flat. Looking at the photos, I suspect a bit more negative rear camber may come in handy. I'll have to do some temperature testing. From behind the wheel I was just having a ball - and that's the whole point, isn't it? The best part of the weekend? Janel dropped 4 seconds off her time and is now asking for 1) her own helmet and 2) if we can go to a track day at Pueblo in October. We've created a monster. entry 965 of 1439 |