Sunday, December 14, 2008 - 06:12 am, by: Ben Lipman(Ben12a)
Holy crap!
That was great fun. Those Circuit Club boys know how to run a hassle free track day.
I couldn't fault the car. There were a few little niggling issues that were fixed as I went along. For example: the drivers mirror rotated up at around 80+km on the first lap, and dropped down to normal when I hit the brakes. Turned out the glass was not clipped in properly, and it was just sitting on the hooks.
There was a noise from the rear of the car about halfway through the day. This appears to have just been the three top suspension nuts coming loose, and was easily rectified.
The Toyos are great. It appears that I'm still not working them hard enough. I had 34psi (hot) in them and the consensus along the lane was to go lower. I dropped them top 33(front) and 32(rear) and they started to heat up. If anyone has experience on these tyres, I'm happy to hear from you.
As for lap times, predictably they tumbled throughout the day. I was put in group D initially as I was a newbie. This made it damn hard to do a lap. I found I was constantly getting on it, only to catch a queue of cars. On a cleaner lap I did a 1:18. After a while I dropped it down to a best of 1:15.2. That would have put me third in group B at lunch. Now I have a meet under my belt, I should be put in a higher class. On the up side, overtaking all those cars was FUN!
Scott Casey came to the track and took some good pics. I have included some below.
