 Not my finest day. Technically I dropped my fastest time around Thill down to a 2:03.05 but we were running the bypass so I should have been at least 1s faster. Unfortunately I couldn't find the confidence to do it. Alas. Part of that may be due to some rubbing issues I had in the morning. Coming down from the bypass into the right the cabin was filling with smoke. I stopped once and assumed it was the bumper repair on the right side so I trimmed down the bodywork a bit back there because I noticed a bit of rubbing. However, the cabin filled with smoke again the next time around so I jacked up the left side of the car and put blue tape over a couple suspicious spots. During the next session there was no rubbing. Sigh. I think the other factor contributing to my lack of confidence was the new alignment. Prior to the track day I took the car to Roger Kraus and they told me the front and rear had some toe-in. In addition, the front-right caster was way off. I elected to hold off on the caster adjustment until next time when I go in for a full corner-balance. I asked them to eliminate the front toe and reduce the rear-toe to somewhere between 1/8 and 1/16 (which is the recommended setting). I'm sure that contributed to the extra squirmy-ness I felt. Next time I think I might ask for a tiny bit of front toe. I also wonder if I should drop the rear spring rate down to 900lbs. H'mmm... Those incidents basically killed my morning. I jumped back in the car in the afternoon and felt a little better. Here are 2 vids from the fifth session run around 2:20p in the afternoon: Fast lap: They only other change I made was to remove the oil cooler since it was keeping the oil temps <200F at all times. In the moderate 80deg weather the water temps never rose above 190F. I lost oil temp when I removed the sandwich plate adapter but I will be ordering another one shortly to use for the Stack temp-sender. The car also produced even more blow-by than last time. In approximately 100min of driving I drained 1.5 quarts of oil from the catch tank. The reason must be due to the bypass. At Buttonwillow last spring the car blew smoke primarily over Lost Hill so that leads me to believe that reduce vertical G situations lead to blow by. Either way I replaced the oil with 10w40 so the car has a ~2.5:1 mix of 5w30 and 10w40 in it now. |