wstar's Journal

wstar

Ran the car today at an SCCA-styled event put on by the BMW CCA here in Houston. Belsavis tipped me off to this, since he's been going with them a while. It was a blast, I highly recommend trying out an SCCA event if you haven't and get the chance.

This was my first time in one, and aside from being fun it was a real eye opener on the capabilities of the car. They were short on ride-along instructor types for us novices. I did 4 runs, but I was on my own for the first three and then picked up someone to help me out on the 4th. My times went down progressively from 98 seconds on the first run to 88 on the last. But for example Belsavis said he was running about 75s on this same course, he's got more experience at it. The fastest cars (e.g. very prepped Miatas on slicks) were running something like 68-69s. I never touched a cone the whole day though, so that was my little personal victory. The ridealong guy on the 4th run said I was doing great for my first day. His main points that he said I needed to work on was:

(1) using late apex corners correctly (there were a few on this layout where a very late apex followed by a sharp turnin was best, but I kept apexing early and trying to shape it like a "normal" corner).

and (2) He said I was driving a bit too conservative for this event (which is I guess why I didn't hit any cones) and that I could basically do exactly what I was doing with a lot more throttle and the car would make it through without losing control. I'm chalking my lack of balls there to the street-vs-track mentality adjustment. My internal barometer of safety margins given the random-ness of a city street (unpredictable drivers, random objects in the road, the amount of damage you can face if you hit a curb, etc) are just more conservative, and it's hard to make myself feel comfortable pushing the car all-out without a large margin for last-minute corrections, if you know what I mean.

Anyways, so I have things to work on for next time. Mechanically the car held up great. The Conti DW's had tons of grip, stock rotors/calipers + Hawk HPS pads worked reliably and predictably, although I noticed I could hear one of my wear indicators on the way home, they were all fine before the event. Good thing new pads are already in the mail. After the first (colder) run, the next three were pretty stable on oil temp profile. It would peak around 232-236 near the end of the run, and in the (very) few minutes I shut down between runs, it would fall back to about 220-ish for the next run. Weather was ~101F outside today, it was unbearably hot all day.

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