Taking your Mustang to an open track/HPDE event for the first time? Do you race competitively? This forum is for you! Log in to remove most ads.
This site may earn a commission from merchant affiliate links, including eBay, Amazon, and others.
Man that's a busy track! Makes me tired just watching. Car looks hooked.
.50 is flat gettin it!! Which rear gear ratio are you running?
17 turns and they all have their own personality - love that track!
3.73 sir!
.
That little Honda gets with the program doesn’t it.
I’m going to pretend I didn’t hear that….
Its one of the most impressive cars I've ever seen - its hobbled together - junkyard motor, HUGE supercharger, quaife sequential and weighs nothing. Has wilwood brakes and I don't remember the dampers being anything fancy. All built by a team of one. Then the driver is both fearless and talented.
In order to finish first you must first finish. There’s a lot to be said for reliability.
That's a statement that needs to be quoted!!!!!!.....and can apply to many things in life.............Well said!!!!!
@navseng here are the posts I was referencing in our DM. Click the "return" link at the top, since the quotes don't carry the images forward.NASA Bondurant Weekend - April 2018
In April NASA AZ mixed things up a little bit and arrived at the "Main" school track at the Bob Bondurant Racing School, here in Chandler, AZ.
The configuration we ran features triple-digit blind sweepers, tight hairpin turns, and about as much elevation change as you can get in the Phoenix Valley.
This is the track that Bondurant uses for their racing schools the most, and it is typically a private facility open only to employees and students--so when our NASA AZ clan brokered a deal for a race weekend, many of us jumped at the chance to run.
A handful of us had run here before, sort of, with our sister group ProAutosports during their annual Thanksgiving weekend events, however at those events the track is joined with the Wild Horse Pass "Main" track making a 2.75 mile combined road course, instead of the 1.6 mile configuration we would run this time.
I have raced here before, sort of...
View attachment 4189
It was a bit of a relaxing weekend for me, actually. Other than camber change, I didn't have to really touch the car since the prior month's event at Wild Horse Pass East. And while a number of competitors complained about the bumpy and choppy pavement, my setup was already poised to make the most of these surfaces.
Despite that advantage, I didn't qualify so hot for Saturday's race--partied too hard the prior evening and was feeling it on Saturday morning. I ended up 4th overall and second in-class as we took the green.
I stayed in second for a few laps as I shook off the cobwebs and observed the leader's line, then got a good run going to a spot where I could strike, and took the lead away. I also managed to get around an ST1 Porsche in that same lap, and that buffer guided me to a victory on Saturday, and second overall behind an SU World Challenge Viper.
Saturday's Race:
Our Sunday starting positions would be determined by our fast laps in Saturday's race. During Saturday's race I ran just under 1 second faster than I did in qualifying, on the same tires, in hotter weather. My time during the race was good enough to put me on the Pole in-class and second overall for Sunday's race.
I got off to a good start but was hounded in all of the slow sections of the course by my competitor in his supercharged Honda Civic. I had a clear advantage on the faster sections of the track including the blind-crest sweepers, but the low-speed tight turns in some sections of this track favored the 2300-pound Honda compared to my 3500-pound S197. On top of that, it appeared that my tires had reached the end of their generally-consistent performance and it was very difficult to get the rears to hook up. As such, I was forced to take a defensive line in the sections of a track where the Honda had the advantage. This worked great for about the first third of the race, until I made a mistake and went in too fast to one of the slower corners. I was pushing too hard (and now literally pushing) my way off of the line, which opened up a window for the Honda to take away the inside of the corner from me. Again, it was the same story as at East track--he pulled away from me slightly, but then as his tires fell off, I reeled him back in. I was all over his bumper for the last 1/3 of the race, however he was also familiar with the advantages of the defensive line and used that to hold me off until we crossed the finish line! It wasn't a win for me but it was one of the most entertaining and challenging races I'd had in a long time, and really exemplifies the beauty and flexibility of the NASA "Super Touring" power-to-weight based ruleset, where such vastly different cars can be highly competitive with one another. Despite coming in second place, I did manage to set the track record for ST2 while reeling the leader back in during the race.
Sunday's Race:
Here is a bit of analysis of my best lap of the weekend using CorteX's cambered rear and JRi dampers vs. my best "portion" of the lap from the larger "Mondo" configuration on A7s MCS setup. Since the "Mondo" lap is on a longer/different track, I have overlaid and circled the section of the graphs to pay attention to.
Again, a continued finding is that this setup is able to generate a ton of grip (top graph, "GPS_LatAcc") on the less grippy of two compounds of tires. When I finally do slap the grippier A7s on, this thing is going to be an absolute rocket ship.
Let's look a little closer at some of the data--there are a couple good examples of how the cambered rear, watts, and shock setup gives an advantage vs. a "conventional" S197 setup.
On the back side of the track in the high-speed sweepers, I was able to confidently feed in more throttle coming out of the corners (Arrows 1 and 2, green trace) compared to before. This resulted in more MPH carried through this section (note higher MPH green trace in the region around Arrow 3), which translated into a lap time improvement vs. the prior best lap (See increasing magnitude of red line compared to green reference time line at Arrow #4).
One important thing to note is that due to the configuration difference entering the Start/Finish straight, the throttle application entering the first corner and set of sweepers is notably lower since the entry speed is so much higher already (Arrow 5 throttle, Arrow 6 GPS speed).
The configuration entry speed difference is worth about 0.4 second on this short track, and what I was able to effect with the CorteX gear was about another full second on top of that. If the car had been on equivalent tires this time, that gap contributed by the suspension would be amplified considerably.
Here is the "overlap" region, zoomed in. Note bottom section of the graph is the time delta. I have the cursor set to the spot where the configurations begin to diverge--at this point the combination of configuration difference (front straight speed) and CorteX suspension is 1.4 seconds faster. Looking at the delta at the "beginning" of the lap to where they converge at Turn 1, the contribution of the course configuration is about 0.4 seconds. So about a second faster with the new suspension, on slower tires.
View attachment 49848
That earlier throttle application was worth almost 8mph speed delta in that portion of the back sweepers:
View attachment 49849
The time advantage in that section of the track alone was worth almost half a second:
View attachment 49850
Stay tuned for my COTA "recon mission" write up!
