Finally the stars aligned and I was able to make time to go to
Red Meat & Race Fuel @ MSR today. This was my first experience with a real road course. It's a 2.38 mile course and we were using the full course config.
It was a really nice informal event. Probably around 10-15 street cars on and off at various times, come and go off the track as you please, passing mostly only on the straights with a hand signal. The other drivers were all pretty nice guys, and there were a few racecars out testing on the track too.
I highly recommend it to others in the area. There's 4 more of these events coming up this year, and it's a cheap way to get your feet wet driving on a real track. Probably the most fun I've had fully clothed in a long time.
I went out on the track 3 times while I was there, for basically one 30 minute session, and two more 15 minute sessions. The car held up great mostly. Keep in mind I'm new at this, and I've never seen the course before, so I was taking it a bit easy (decelerating earlier and softer than necc at the ends of straights out of fear, etc). For extra scare factor, the track was a bit wet from some rain an hour or two before the event.
It was a real eye opener on how much I could stand to improve my driving skills, following some of the other regulars around the track. I really need to sign up for some kind of HPDE / instructor-led event soon. I managed to go off-track only once, during my second session (which is why I cut that one short at 15 minutes, I wanted to make sure everything was ok under the car).
Tires and brakes held up fine. Oil temps were better than expected, given I'm on a 19-row and this is summer in TX. It would pull up to 240 on the dot a couple of minutes into a session and then just hang there stable. The last session it nudged up to 250 (weather was heating up, and I was getting more confident and driving harder too). I cut my third session short too, because as I was accelerating out of a tight corner, it seemed like I was being hit by a rev-limit or something right as I hit about 6K RPM.
My first thought was limp-mode, but again oil temps were merely 250. Then I realized I was down to 1/2 tank of gas now, and most likely it was fuel starvation. On the next straight a few seconds later I was able to go all the way to the redline again, but I figured that was a good time to end the day anyways instead of playing with the fuel starvation on the next several corners.
Got a few pics and video of my 2nd session from my windshield pov (including my run off the track), I'll upload it all later, I'm tired
.