TravisJB Journal

travisjb

Today at VIR...

Good
- my god, the car is fast! and smooth power delivery... I so enjoyed dropping the hammer and being able to keep up with all the "fast" cars

- water-oil heat exchanger is working great

- VIR is amazing! my new favorite track... it is brutal for those that don't pay attention and rewarding as heck every time I would put down a lap was finding many many ways to improve... sadly, didn't get too far in today

Bad
- had a slight off road excursion... was constantly monitoring my temps (for good reason explained below), and unfortunately looked down just a moment too long... was heading for the field on left side of turn 1 and approaching track out at ~120mph. Made a split decision not to fight it and just ride in straight on out... was the right call as I think if I had gone off with a big slip angle things would have gotten ugly... VIR field is a roller coaster! my rear diffuser dug in hard and ripped to shreds... gonna need a new rear fascia... otherwise no harm done

- three sessions later... all of my sessions are ending after 3 laps due to water overheating... on the fourth session, I'm pretty sure I blew a head gasket (pretty sure)... so much steam vapor I thought the car was on fire and so did the corner workers... ditched on the right side of 13 and was ready to fly out of the car, but it turned out to be water vapors... I fault the airflow setup... radiator has plenty of capacity, it's just not getting any air... it's going to have to be boxed in and double that up with a couple dedicated hoses and I'm not sure what else but need to get a lot more cooling... car would not restart (why was I stupid enough to try? who knows!)

Again, one upshot to all this - the fact that I had boiling water and never over 265F is a testament to the water-oil heat exchanger...

Trying to be an optimist, but boy have I had enough maintenance on this car! My next race car will be the maintenance-free type

__________________
2009 370Z #104
*For Sale*