Tuesday, May 21, 2013

Be Progressive! B-E PROGRESSIVE!!!

     So another track weekend has come and gone...in the form of 1000 miles and a lot of gas money.

     After what should have been about a max of 6 hours of driving taking 9 freaking hours on Friday, My dad and I had dinner and crashed for the night.  In typical fashion I woke up like a kid at Disney Land Saturday morning and made my way to the track.  My instructor had emailed me Wednesday before the event to have a quick discussion about expectations for both of us as well as my car etc, which was pretty nice.  Even though some fellow evo guys think I'd be fine in DE2 with NASA, I decided to stick with DE1 so that I was guaranteed an instructor all day.  With 5 track days under my belt prior, I explained to my instructor that I was really looking for some coaching and to see if we could identify my specific weak areas.  The issue I was slightly expecting was that it can be very difficult for a non evo driver to instruct in an evo...my instructor (Alan) was of course a Porsche GT2 Rs driver.

     Lightning was a much more technical track than I initially expected, but damn is it a fun one.  For the first session I started slow and began ramping up the speed while keeping the braking zones long.  As soon as I got comfortable my wonderful brake shudder came BACK!  Lets back up for a second...if you look back a few posts, you'll see the brake issues I had at LRP last month.  In an attempt to combat this issue, which was assumed to be cause by some bad deposits, I put on a set of new blank rotors, but with the same pads...dumb idea.

     Overall the day went well, Alan told me it was impressive to see how quickly I was able to pick up and show that I knew the line.  Notice I said knew the line, not drove the line.  I was having some...well...issues putting the car exactly where I wanted at times and I honestly think it was due to losing focus thanks to the still grinding 4th and 5th gear syncros as well as the god damn brakes.  At the end of the day, Alan was able to pinpoint exactly what I was doing wrong under braking...i am not PROGRESSIVE, I seem to be either on or off the brakes instead of gradually increasing pressure nad the "rolling" off and back to the gas.  I started to get a little frustrated in the afternoon with the car, and myself for not being able to do what I knew I was needing to do so I called it a day.




     Now all that was left was to drive my ass all the way back to RI.  In the end, the car was impressive honestly.  I have never driven it that much in such a short period of time, it didn't event flinch at the trip and even managed 26mpg on one tank of gas.  The addition of about 10 square feet of dynamat to the trunk floor help GREATLY as my head didn't feel like it was going to explode after 2 hours of highway cruising.

     I know I've said it in probably the last 3 posts now, but hopefully I will get to work on ECU boost this weekend finally.  I'm waiting on a large parts order including clutch/flywheel/fluids/stage 1 transmission so that I can get the car back to almost perfect.  I thought everything was on schedule but of course now I was told 3-4 week wait on the gear box...oh and this:


 Apparently I ordered a clutch and they shipped drugs???  I mean c'mon...

     The other big issue right now is safety.  Some big wrecks have happened in Time attack/track days lately and safety has been constantly on my mind.  I will probably be ordering a Hybrid Pro Rage neck restraint and new helmet very soon to hold me over while I try and decide on what to do about a cage/seats/harnesses

  Next event will hopefully be NASA at Pocono July12-14 pending my day off request with work.  I've pretty much decided to dump all June events due to the transmission, Having to baby the car gets frustrating VERY quickly.  No idea on other events...

     Not to self:  WaWa's by NJMP only have 92 octane.  I found out the stupid way that my car does not enjoy 92 octane....and then had to spend $70 on a half tank of 100 octane.


See ya on the track.


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