Well, while everyone else was out playing in parking lots this past weekend, I went down to Texas World Speedway and ran the 2.9-mile road course with NASA. We got to the track around 4 on Friday afternoon and several of us signed up for the 5-6pm "happy hour" open track session to dial our cars in. I swapped pads and tires, went out and ran about eight laps, came in and reset the tire pressures and cranked the front rebound up, then went back out and ran another eight laps. The car felt pretty good overall, with just a touch of steady-state understeer. The only bad habit the car had was a tendency for the back end to feel like it was wandering around a little bit under threshold braking, but it wasn't enough to alter my braking points or line.
I had forgotten just how much fun the 2.9 mile configuration is. This is a fast track - my average clear lap times were in the 2:06-2:09 range, which means an average speed of 83-84mph. This configuration uses the front straight and Turn 1 of a 1.5-mile high banked oval, where I was showing ~125mph on the speedometer Friday night. In the RX-8 I can run the entire track in the meat of the powerband with only 3rd and 4th gear (suprisingly, 4th gear in the '8 is good for a hair over 130mph indicated, while 3rd fuel cuts at 93mph indicated on my 255/40-17 tires). Several of the corners have deep camber near the apex, so once you learn the configuration you can enter these corners at a much higher rate of speed than you think, and the camber will suck you down to the apex and slingshot you out on the proper line. It's addictive. :wink: There is also a complex section of blind and cambered corners (turns 7-9 for those of you who know the layout) that you enter at ~100mph and come up over a blind ridge.
It's a great track, but not the most forgiving. I ran with the advanced HPDE/time trial group, and a couple of the cars went home on a flatbed Saturday night. One car lifted tracking out of 12 (a deeply cambered left hander that I track out 90-92mph), spun to the inside, and hit the vertical back of the curbing in 14 broadside. He wasn't moving very fast when it happened, but it messed up both right side wheels and bent the control arms on that side.
More significantly, an Evo went off in Turn 1 and hit a drainage ditch. The Evo was pretty modified, and was doing ~150mph at the end of the front straight. He turned in early on 1, hit a ripple in the pavement right after the transition down from the banking, and skated off to the outside. He got the car straightened out, but hit a shallow drainage ditch head-on at probably 80-90mph. The car was bent up... but it was still driveable! In fact, the owner drove it back to his hotel Saturday night, then limped it home on Sunday!
He had a small camera mounted to the grill in front of the intercooler. After the track closed Saturday night, several guys took a truck out into the field to find all of the parts that the Evo had shed when it hit the ditch. They managed to recover the camera, and it still worked! We downloaded the video to a friend's laptop, and it's some of the best track day footage I've ever seen. :mrgreen: I'll post a link once it's up on the web.
If you need a bulletproof camera, look for a small SD-card camera on Soulspeed's website. Those things are indestructible!
Overall, it was a good weekend. I wasn't able to get any "official" lap times (I borrowed a friend's transponder for the last session, but the batteries were dead). Still, I was able to consistently run down all of the TTD and TTC cars out there (my car would fit into TTD if I ran time trial). I intend to go up to Hallett in June for the next event, and I'll run TTD.
As a side note, one of my good friends (27h2hc on this board) won his first race this weekend in PTB! He just got his comp license back in November, and he was running strong all weekend. Congrats to him!
