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 ...
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| Overall checks while the oil is drained |
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| Putting high temp. grease on the back of the pad. Small trick I learnt from SEEKER |
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| 5.4L of oil is what it takes to make this engine happy |
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| And we're done ! |
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
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