Another 370z track review thread

[Marcus Ryan]

All,

Just thought I'd share my 2 cents on this one.

I'm all stock, not a mod on it, have 6k miles.

The short version is this: It was awesome until I was kicked off the track by oil temp issues.

The car handled awesome and I mean awesome, it was responsive and communicative and after only a few laps I felt like I knew exactly what state the car was in. It had plenty of power for this track, more is always better of course, but my buddy was in a 135i making 330hp to the floor and I was able to make up the distance in the turns he was able to put on me in the straights.

There was also a guy in an M3 that absolutely could not catch me. Not to say that this indicates our cars perform better, but it was at least enough that the superior performance of the M3 was not enough to compensate for gap in our driving. Take it for what you will.

Now the bad, the oil temp issues were BAD! I'd let the car cool down completely, for about an hour, getting the temps down to about 140 degrees and after 2 maybe 3 laps, the temps were high enough to where I was getting rev limited. The day started out at around 80 degrees and went as high as 95 and the only real difference was a lap or two. It was extremely frustrating, and it made the car look bad. The people there, including my driving instructor, were pretty shocked that the temps would be so high after so short a time on the track. I won't be back without dealing with this issue.

In any case it pisses me off and I feel like this is a prime example of corner cutting. There's no way a performance car should have these problems, its ******** and if I were looking at cars right now and knew about this it'd play a significant factor.

To anyone else thinking about tracking their cars who haven't already, don't go without an oil cooler, it won't be pretty.