Hey MNSubaru, just wanted to give a run down of my day @ BIR with Track Time Motorsports & Chong (Musashi) teaching me to drive. Here's a quick video of a couple laps early in the day. Sorry for the lack of editing/data or music. It would have been nice to write this up when it was still fresh but I just didn't have the time. So here goes: Got to the track and unloaded the massive amount of crap out of my car from camping over the weekend. Met up with Chong and found out I was pretty much the only student he would be working with for the day. Nice. So I torqued my lug nuts and we hit the track. I told myself all week that I was not going to just beat the piss out of my car, and instead I would take my time, go slow (if I had to) and do it right. So we quickly found out that was what I had to do for a while. My throttle and steering inputs would pretty smooth, but my shifting needed some serious work as did my timing with braking. I appreciated the fact that Chong didn't overload me with a ton of technical stuff, he stuck to the basics and just had me work on shifting and braking. I had been to the track a couple times before, so was pretty comfortable with a line and didn't have to worry much about that. We spent all morning just working on smoothing things out and getting my timing down. Chong also pointed out on turns 3-6 I was initially using 3rd gear (Spec B gears) through them and it resulted in two things: 1) too "twitchy" and easy to break traction, 2) required me to downshift another gear on every corner which I suck at. After he drove my car a few laps, he said there was enough low end torque in 4th that I didn't need to go to third every time. So we eliminated that shift which worked out really well. My tires were a lot happier and everything was a lot smoother. The other piece I needed work on was timing with braking. Especially once I started to bring the speeds up, I continued a habit I had last year by braking too early. Just one of those beginner things where you have to be patient and brake late enough and progressive enough that it all gets done in a short amount of time, and I'm not putting so much heat into my brakes in the process. I was feeling pretty confident with this by the end of the day, but still working on corner 12. We also adjusted my coilovers, tightened everything up all the way around and wow, what a difference. It was little mushy when we first started, and with just a few clicks, everything felt so much better. The car was a lot more nuetral handling and it felt great going through the carousel! After lunch, I was able to drive pretty much whenever I wanted and was by myself for the rest of the day. There weren't a lot of people at the track this day to beging with and after lunch it started to thin out even more. I hooked up my go pro and started to experiment with that. I have some things I want to try and maybe look into datalogging. Video's just not the same when you can't see speed, rpms, boost, etc. Towards the end I was getting a lot better with the easier parts of the track and the result was that it was shooting me into the more difficult parts at a lot higher speeds. So this is where my flaws with braking and downshifting amplified and I started to screw up turns 3 and 12. On the last session, Chong had me do two warm up laps, just walking through all the proper technique, then alternate walking through turns and going full speed through them. One lap, walk through the odds, the next lap, nail them, the next lap walk through the evens, the next lap, nail them. After those 6 laps, things felt much better. The last session was by far my best, particularly the last two laps when I finally when back to full aggression with better technique. I wish I was timing my laps somehow so I could see the diffrerence. Unfortunately my battery died in the gopro so I didn't get any footage. Next time... All in all, I had a great learning experience and I feel much more confident how hard I can push my car, and the fact that it will treat me well near the limit. Thanks again Chong for the excellent instruction, and thanks NF performance for a great road racing tune, a block that's continued to take the beating, and a transmission that works again (just in time!)
Thanks for taking the time to sharing your experience. I'm on my way to kick boxing and will contribute to your post very soon. Thanks for the opportunity to work with you.
I'm glad we were able to pick up from where we left off last year. Instinctively we are very competitive by nature and for some their triggers are much easier to engage then others. I think that once we were able identify the triggers it was much easier to get you to focus on your driving. You did a great job of adapting to your unbalanced suspension. Once we figured out the passenger front was off from the rest the car was so much easier to drive fast. You caught on so quickly and impressed me with your ability to drive a +400 whp on a set of 225 tires. Everything you were challenged with last year was not apparent by the end of the day. Sometimes not having someone looking over your shoulder goes a long way especially when you take instructions very well, right Captain. The coolest part of the day for me was seeing you put all that focused aggression into the car the correct way taking you into uncomfortable territory, reaching speeds you didn't think you could have done before.
This is one of the most fun project car I have ever messed with!!! Glad to see both of you enjoying the car and working together
Thanks for the video man. I am glad that the the GoPro setup worked out for you. We should all try and make it out to the same events next year. Since I can't give Xluben a run for his money maybe you can . It's really nice that there weren't other students out there with you. It sounds like you got a lot more laps in than we did over the weekend with the BMW club.
Would have loved if you made it out to the MAP event. When's the next event? Would've gave those boys a run for their $$$
Oh we had that conversation already, but we both knew what would've happened if he went MIA during Drills. I have no doubts he'll ever have to worry about get passed this time around lol
