A new track - a lot of mixed feelings

Last week I went out to the RAC Driving Centre near Perth International Airport to join a Tuning Day organised by MC Motorsport. It was a 2 hour "event" of driving on their private road course and the #4 skidpan.

It all started with an instructor giving us a rundown on the layout of the course and all the do's and don'ts. Initially we were told only to use the road course but since there were only 7 drivers (out of a maximum of 24) the instructor extended it to the spidpan. I was the only one who attended the session for the 1st time so I was asked to follow the rest of the group on a couple of laps around the course to get me accustomed to the track and the layout.

After about 10 mins it was my turn to go out on my own.

The 1st thing I noticed immediately was how hard the track was on the engine. It was mainly 2nd gear in high revs with an occasional 3rd down the back and main straights. The distance travelled on a single lap was approximately 1.53km and the length of the track reminded me a lot of Tsukuba 1000 although a few of the corners were almost a carbon copy of what I had experienced at Ebisu East. Nonetheless it was a fun little track but narrow, very abbrasive on tyres and tough on brakes as you get very little cool down in the types of events people do there. On top of that no decent run-offs if you end up going wide.

Nevertheless in my case (of 3 laps per go) my brakes worked very well, although if I was to do a single lap attack it probably wouldn't have been the same. Tyres didn't get much time to warm up and so there was much less grip than otherwise.

So will I ever consider competing in the sprint series ? ...

Well at the moment all I can say is I am undecided. Undecided because most of the sprint rounds actually don't include the road circuit and cover only various skidpan layouts available. Competing in these events would consume my brakes/tyres and rotors far quicker than on a proper circuit and I wouldn't really gain much other than satisfaction of being able to memorize the layout around a set of cones. On the other hand it wouldnt hurt to compete and test my memory and give my car (and myself) a different type of workout....

The jury is still out ...

Video coming soon ...
- Rod

DC5 vs EVO chase video at Barbagallo

Barbagallo Best Lap Video 1'08''77

Here it is !
Ignore my excitement at the end of the video, been watching F1 too much !



- Rod

Barbagallo and my personal best lap streak continues ... !

TRACK PREPARATION

First off, spent a couple of hours last week working on the car.

Changed the engine oil to MOTUL 300V Power Racing 5w-30, oil filter, transmission fluid and of course my new Project MU Level Max700 pads. The old Project MU HC-CS pads were less than 1cm thick and needed swapping. After about 4 hours of playing mechanic I was done and the car was ready for the upcoming track day.

Here are some photos but apologies for poor quality in some of them as they were taken with an iPhone ...

Overall checks while the oil is drained

Putting high temp. grease on the back of the pad.
Small trick I learnt from SEEKER



5.4L of oil is what it takes to make this engine happy

And we're done !

TRACK DAY

Saturday was the day however we had a fairly severe storm here in Perth the day before and a vast majority of places in Perth were covered in water. I was a bit sceptical about saturday thinking it might be too wet to really warrant a trip out to the track but when I woke up on that morning I was greeted with clear, sunny skies and dream 10C time attack temperatures !

Here is a little fun story ! On my way to the circuit I had to stop and wait when I saw a little kangaroo sitting on the road soaking up the morning sun. It took a few honks to get him moving again (see below) ...

When I finally got to the circuit I was surprised how many cars were already on the track and it was only 9am !! The track was damp, wet in places but quickly drying up. To my surprise I saw a bunch of Hyundais Getses battling it out amongst Fords and Holdens. Every now and then someone span out and had to be towed back. It looked very uncertain out there.

I got myself setup and off I went for my 1st stint.

First impressions were good. The track was in fact damp in some places but at the same time it was also quite clean and grippy in others. Fighting a little bit of traffic but making the most of cold ambient temperatures and my new brake pads I recorded a total of 12 laps with lap 8 already beating my previous personal best.

Watching my Predictive Lap Timing display in the Performance Box indicating I was progressively ahead of my lap 8's personal best, on lap 10 I subsequently recorded a new personal best of 1'08''77 !!

I can attribute today's result to a number of factors. #1 cooler ambient temperatures, #2 amazing (!!) performance of these pads (I used them in Suzuka last year and experienced the same level of perfomance as here), #3 cleaner race track !. That's right, i found that as the day progressed the track became less and less grippy especially in key corners compared to the morning's.

Here are the results from my 2nd stint.

Similarly to stint #1, I recorded a 1'08''99 which was close but not quite as fast as in stint #1.

There was a lot of carnage on the day.
I had a bit of a chase with an EVO which span out in front of me at the exit from the back hairpin, I had the same situation happen again when I was chasing a Commodore which wasn't as lucky and ended up deep in the sand on the same hairpin and had to wait to be pulled out.

The outside (or the dirty side) of every corner was not the place you wanted to be as it guranteed a loss of grip and a trip to the sand. Nevertheless I enjoyed my run and thankfully so far I haven't yet spun out of control on this track. Fingers crossed !! (Am I not pushing hard enough ???)

After doing some detailed analysis in Circuit Tools I am confident I can gain another 0.5-1.0 seconds hopefully going into 1'07s....

I observed that the place where I was loosing most of my time was on the exit of the back hairpin all the way down to the last corner. I'm thinking of changing my race line around there as a means of experimenting to see how that improves the overall lap time. A better exit guarantees a higher average speed therefore a reduced lap time but it's easier said than done...The remaining 65% of the track was no problem.

Great day, met a few new people, chatted with some friends and overall went away satisfied with my efforts.

The Predictive Laptiming feature of Performance Box is GOLD ! I absolutely love it and seeing the graphical representation of your efforts every second is second to none ! If you haven't upgraded your firmwire do it now !

Next event is RAC Tuning Day this coming thursday !

I'll post a video of today's session in the days to come ...

- Rod

Winter is upon us !

I caught a pretty bad cold and I feel like s#it so in absence of anything better to do here is a quick update...

RAC DRIVING CENTRE

Yesterday I went out to the RAC Driving Centre (see earlier posts) to watch their friday's tuning session.
The weather was nice and about 11-12 cars showed up. Majority of the cars were stock standard with an exception of 3 cars which I had seen before at Barbagallo. Makes were ranging from FIAT, BMW, Nissan, Subaru, Holden and others so it was interesting to watch them negotiate the course and individual drivers' different driving styles.

The course seemed fairly easy and relatively low-medium speed. A few of the drivers I could tell had good driving skills by watching their approach to one of the hairpins, others were in desperate need of some tuition. All in all each driver got about 1-2mins to cover 2 laps before the next car's turn to enter the course. At times they allowed more than 1 car at the same time.

By chatting with some of the guys I gathered this tuning session was their prep before this Sunday's actual event held at this location but extended to the full course meaning road and gymhkana areas. If my head stops hurting I might drive out there and watch them.

ENGINE OIL

Yesterday I also took delivery of my new batch of MOTUL 300V engine oil.

There is something different about this one though ! Can you tell what it is ?
This time I went for 5w-30 as opposed to 10w-40. From previous experience I learnt that 5w-30 being thinner will enhance car's acceleration but at the same time will not protect the engine as well as the 10w-40. It is a compromise I am willing to accept.

The price $48/2L bottle (retails at $57.99)

TIME ATTACK RESULTS

I've been getting a few emails recently asking me why I was so confident in saying that after beating my best time there was usually another 1 or 2 seconds to be slashed. Here is how I see it ....

"If your improvements between best laps are in the vicinity of 1s there is a high probability you will again be able to improve by at most or around 1s. If however your recent improvements are consistently yielding perhaps 0.5s or even less well that's when you'll know you're extracting the maximum and unless you upgrade something or improve your driving style dramatically there is a very low probability of improving by 1s."

Hope that explains my "confidence". Come to think of it next improvement will probably be the last of those 1s ones

- Rod

REDLINE shockproof lightweight gear oil - my thoughts

I just took delivery of the 2nd batch of this gear oil. As you may remember I was a huge fan of OMEGAOIL however since it's not easily available here in Australia together with Ryo from SEEKER's advice I opted for REDLINE lightweight shockproof instead. Here is my short review in the context of DC5's manual transmission.

First of all, the oil performs VERY well. I was pleasantly surprised how easy it was to change gears under various track conditions (both cool and very hot weather conditions!). Whilst changing down from 4th to 3rd and down to 2nd, I never experienced any gear crunching nor slippage. In fact a lot of people here told me it was common for a gear to "slip out" when using this oil but again this has never happened to me. Under very hot engine / gearbox conditions changes were smooth, direct and controllable. It's very much comparable to OMEGAOIL.

Secondly, it isn't a good oil when you start the car up on a cold day and drive it for the first 5-10mins. It is difficult to change gears until such point that oil is warmed up to its proper operating temperature. That I guess is to be expected, although not the case if you have the original Honda MTF.

I drove about 2,000kms with this oil, 4 tuning days and now it's time for a change. Not because the gearbox is calling for it but because I want to pre-emptively continue on preserving it.

Highly recommended ! AUD$25 per bottle. If you want more info i'll send you the details of my eBay supplier !

- Rod