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Quote:

Originally Posted by sig11 (Post 2687321)

Y'all are pansies for not running in the ice! Get the tires warm and it's pretty close to rain. :)

Hah! Yeah I had zero desire to do my first session ever at COTA on ice, especially given all the repeated "You break it you buy it" warnings about their expensive crash barriers and surfaces :) If I managed to eat a wall with my car, it might've cost more to repair COTA than the car itself :p

Quote:

Originally Posted by Mike (Post 2687345)

Great meeting you Brandon!

You too, had a blast :)

I was in Austin on Saturday and totally forgot about this event :(
Looked like fun!

Doh, you could've come by to hang out at least :)

I reviewed a bunch of the rest of my footage. There's some interesting learning moments in there that aren't exciting to watch, and there's a bunch of exciting clips of other people's errors/spins/offs that I probably shouldn't publish for them, some people are sensitive about these things.

The most tempting footage was several separate times getting stuck behind this one Porsche who was like a rolling safety hazard all weekend, going something like half the group's pace and randomly off-line all the time. The first couple of times I wondered if he was drunk, or had just had a stroke mid-session, but eventually I figured out that was just "normal". Anyways, not posting that either because I'm a nice guy :P

I do post my own errors though! There was one definite loss-of-control moment in T12 here that got exciting, it was nearly a spin, but kinda saved it while losing all my speed. That was the only thing close to an incident I had throughout the event. Overall it was a pretty clean weekend.

great times from both of u guys!:tup: now theres no pressure for next month... lol really looking good out there brandon, we need to actually coordinate some time to be at the same event this year.

Looking good! I have an instructing gig there with Lone Star BMW March 21st-23rd. I can't wait to get back out there with the surge tank since last year I would start to starve on 16-17-18 after 5 laps.

Yeah I can imagine, 16-17-18 looks like it would be fuel starve hell with our stock setup :)

My known schedule in the immediate future is:

Mar 1-2 - TWS (Driver's Edge)
Apr 5-6 - MSR-Houston (Driver's Edge)
Apr 26 - Harris Hill (Nismo Fiesta)
May 17-18 - TWS (Driver's Edge) (signup is on Mar 17 @ 9:00AM)

I'll probably have some work travel to schedule around in late March or mid-April, so I doubt that I can squeeze much else in given that work travel tends not get firm dates until the last second :P.

Chris introduced me to Sean Farrah (of SPL Parts, and also TX Regional Director for NASA TT) at COTA over the weekend and we chatted a bit, and that has lead to a renewed interest in hitting some NASA events sometime by mid-summer and start working my way into their system. Do their DEs a little and qualify up to do TT3 and then maybe start planning out a path to get me and the car to ST3 someday (or whatever the equivalent is by then).

(although, looking at their schedule, probably my best bets there are Hallet in June, NOLA in Sept, and TWS in Oct).

Quote:

Originally Posted by wstar (Post 2318798)

No garage, just random paddock parking. I've never even looked into garage spaces at any of the TDE events, I guess I should find out about that someday. I'm excited too, but nervous about so many changes on the car all at once.

I couldn't wait for this evening, so I took it out for a stress-test drive over lunch. No leaks, and temp data looks pretty awesome so far. "Normal" street driving - cruising around 2.5Krpm in the mid-day heat, the car would settle at oil/water temps of 180 and 177. I found an empty back-road stretch and gave the car a close-to-track-conditions flogging for about 7 minutes straight and I was still at 200/194. A soon as I backed off the agression, the car cooled back down to its steady-state in a minute or two.

Only problem I noted during the test-drive was an oddly-specific transmission issue. In general the transmission is fine, but if I brake in 3rd gear down to fairly low revs (~3K) and then transition right back to hard gas, the transmission lockup slips, the engine revs up freely for half second, and then the trans finally locks up (and by then the engine's way past matching revs and the tires burn a little). I'll try it again this evening and see if I can characterize it better, maybe. My random diagnostic thoughts right now are:

1) That my filling procedure didn't really work for setting the fluid level correctly, and braking down in 3rd at low revs just happens to slosh the too-low fluid in a way that it can't get pressure to lock up 3rd gear when I nail the gas pedal again. I could break this down into two possible filling errors: (a) that with all the air I needed to work out of the lines/system, my fill just wasn't going to be accurate until I really drove the transmission on the street a bit, in which case going back through the final step would fix it, or (b) technically, I don't think the service manual says to stop the engine when doing the final at-temperature fill/bleed. My best judgement was that turning the engine back off was implicit in the instruction to lift the car, etc, but maybe I really do need the engine running to set the fill correctly.

2) That I've damaged some seal/valve/solenoid whatever from track abuse at the last event and this is the first time I've noticed since getting home and then having the car on the lift forever.

3) Could be with the free-er revving engine (no more AC), I've crossed some threshold where I need to up the line pressure a bit more to catch it? I may play with line pressure in general for debugging this later.

I'd think if it was just a fill problem, I'd be able to reproduce the same slip condition in 2nd or 4th, which I was unable to do with a few attempts earlier, just 3rd. Could be specific to odd gears though (many internal passages/components are odd/even-specific), and it would be hard to reproduce the same type of condition in 1st or 5th.

I really wish I could get on the Nissan Batphone and find out for sure whether the final level check on the transmission was meant to be with the car running. Maybe GTM would know...

I've gotta say your build thread has been VERY cool to read and skim through this morning :tiphat:

I quote this particular post in your thread (in reference to the other relevant pages) as it really was one of the more educated findings about servicing the 7AT and it's fluid. Seems that most owners and newer members just ask how to change the fluid and aren't willing to dig for the right information. In finding 1) you mention a pressure loss in 3rd.

Well, since I've owned my Z this has happened to me ONLY twice. Both times I was flogging the car and as you mention the trans free revs and then catches at a MUCH higher than necessary RPM. That leads me to believe I am probably experiencing a low fluid level but, draining/filling at this time might not be a bad idea. Would you not draw the same conclusion?

Yeah I'd say if you have any odd problems with the trans, check fluid level for sure. I suspect if your level is borderline, fluid sloshing around and affecting pickup under certain G-loadings will make the difference.

Just got done prepping the car for TWS this weekend.

I'm loving having this square tire setup now, with directional-but-symmetrical tires (the RS3's). I had the local NTB flip all four on their rims for $44, then rotated them all around (diagonal). Should even out the wear from my remaining slight camber issues and from 3 weekends in a row all running CCW (TWS->COTA->TWS). Changed the oil and trans fluid (Motul Multi-ATF again), swapped the stock AP bleed screws for SpeedBleeders (finally!) and bled the brakes. Good to go for load-out tomorrow :)

So far on the weather reports Saturday looks ok, maybe some light sprinkles, but Sunday will probably get stormy by lunch. Will be interesting to see how the RS3's feel as it gets progressively wetter throughout the weekend. If they can't take the puddles very well, I can always flip back to my staggered Conti setup, those have huge grooves in them. I really need to work on getting a *good* rain setup for this car though. After seeing some of Mike's various tire/wheel combos at COTA, I'm thinking maybe a square set of 18x9 or 18x9.5 with some rain tires on them, like the Hoosier H2O's or something roughly equivalent. I think he had some Conti/Hoosier actual race-rain tires (as opposed to the H2Os, which are DOT-rated).

If I had the money I was going to pick up a set of the discontinued wets that Mike posted about. Tight winter for me though. ;(

Another fun weekend at TWS! Saturday morning's first session was a little damp, but the rest of the day was pretty dry and fast. Sunday was a wet mess dodging puddles in the falling rain - I only did one session and then packed up since it was looking like the weather was going to get much worse in the afternoon. My front rotor rings are surprisingly in about the same shape they started in, so I may push for another trackday or two on them before replacing them.

The RS-3 tires were better than expected (from internet hearsay) in the wet. They're not a fast tire in the wet; they're slow and don't handle standing water all that well even with good tread depth. But they were easy to predict, control, and recover on in the wet, as opposed to the sometimes-twitchy nature of my old Contis. The slow wet laps were fun instead of death-grip-scary :)

Not a ton else to report, it was fairly uneventful. I didn't do anything stupid, and I shockingly failed to spin the car or throw it off the track. I had a couple of near-misses on those things, but I'm adapted to the RS3's now and doing much better at control/recovery. My braking was sub-par and I did a lot of silly steering-wheel-shaking that I need to stop doing, but I don't care much. Mostly this weekend was playing with driving looser and becoming comfortable with a new level of car control and lots of small corrections, and it was pretty successful. I know where a lot of my suboptimal lines and speeds are at now, and I think I can correct them next time. Maybe next time at TWS I'll really try to optimize the whole picture in one smooth run and put down some really decent lap times.

Anyways, my fast-lap vid for the weekend:

And a highlights/errors vid (a nice traffic management clip, an almost-off in T1, a slippy situation in T4 in the dry that I pulled through without losing speed, and then several wet slip+recover moments):

yo! I see you on the roster for pds @ tws this weekend. I'll be there in my miata. see you this weekend!

Awesome. This is my first time w/ PDS, they put me in Blue Solo, we'll see how it goes :) I'm only up there for Saturday this weekend, and it might be a little wet, but who knows, the weathermen are wrong half the time.

Picked up a single track day w/ PDS @ TWS today. The dollars-per-track-hour just can't be beat there, I have to do more PDS weekends this year! I'm not sure about their entry-level Green group, but everyone else runs basically 8x 24-min sessions per day. Unfortunately I left my SD Card in the computer at home, so I didn't get any data logging or video. Luckily the dash timing stuff works without it, so I was able to record laptimes and see my realtime +/- vs best still. No spins/offs, again, so I didn't miss recording anything exciting really.

It was dry before lunch and wet after. I trimmed my dry time down substantially. A week ago my best was 2:05.65. My first session today I hit 2:04.78, and then in the last session before lunch I managed a 2:03.10 and a 2:03.22 back-to-back when I got free of traffic for a while. I think mostly I was picking that up with being more aggressive on my speeds through T7 and T12, and slowly getting a little better at T1->T3.

My braking is my weak spot now; I really need to up my braking game to keep up with the rest (mostly smoother transitions, but also the location/duration of my braking zones). Still, even if I keep sucking at braking about like I am now, I think I could push my current runs down into 2:01-ish territory if I could get a solid dry weekend in. The wet sessions were fun too, but there are too many different levels of "wet" to really bother tracking times much.

Next event scheduled is Apr 5-6 @ MSR-Houston. It will be nice to get back to my first track again, I haven't been in a while :)