Just got back for the cars first outing at Brainerd. BIR Performance School had an open track day and it was awesome. The car just 'worked'. I set the tire pressures to 30psi cold in the morning and forgot about them the rest of the day. I was running 2:07 to 2:10s on open laps. The car is very fast through the infield and technical sections. I managed 1.3G lateral through turn 4 which is pretty impressive. A friend was there also with another 944 spec and he managed a 2:04.7. Both cars were continually logging and the cause of the problem was quickly identified. Turn 10 is the last turn at the track before the main straight which is almost 1.5 miles long with two turns on it, the first is flat out (120mph) and the second is around 110mph. Clearly, screwing up that corner before such a long high speed run can product bad lap times and that was it.
Rob was killing me out of 10 and carrying maybe 5mph more than me and 5mph over a mile and a half adds up to around 2.7 seconds. The data was interesting comparing both of us. Rob is more aggessive on braking. Hitting the brakes as soon as he's off the throttle and then getting back on the gas very quickly when he stops braking. I was more gingerly so I was slower to hit the brakes and slower on the gas, waiting for the apex sometimes before giving it all the gas. This helped him a lot I think on T10 and T8 but everywhere else, sometimes I was faster then he was, we're talking tenths of seconds here on the infield. T10 dominated though. Of the 2.7 seconds, I lost about 1 second from T1 through T2 basically because I had a very low line through T1 and was scrubbing a lot of speed. I should have gone higher up the banking and swooped down to the apex instead of following the inside of the track which is what I was doing.
The car performed perfectly. Brakes, tires, engine temps, everything. Car was turn key in operation. It burned almost no oil during the 6 sessions, some of which were double stints. I got around 3 hours of track time altogether so that was cool. I was pretty tired after it, it takes a lot of concentration, it's like driving in snow for a long time, it wears you down. Driving through T1 and T2 flat out takes some concentration to avoid any 'issues' and T9 under the bridge is similar. I was pretty soppy headed this morning when I woke up but it's nothing to what Bondurant will be like in two weeks. I'm in Japan next week, flying back on Saturday. Then on Monday I'm flying to Phoenix to do the 4 day Bondurant racing school which is 4-5 hours of track time in Corvette C6s for 4 days which should be a test of will but I'm looking forward to it. Brainerd was a good warmup, I know what I was doing wrong so I can work on them and talk with the instructors about it at Bondurant and hopefully, I'll be faster and smoother afterwards with my competition license in hand.
