Not feeling satisfied after my last visit to Winton, an upcoming Friday Test & Tune was shaping up to have beautiful PB weather, so I pulled the trigger.
This time I went up and back alone, my first time towing alone was a little scary, but everything went well. I did have to get my neighbor to spot me as I loaded the car though – nice guy. The Pajero averaged about 14L/100km while towing, 12-13 @ 80km/h and around 15 @ 110km/h.
The weather was very Tsukuba-esque, freezing cold ~0C rolling into a crisp, sunny day.
There were 8 vehicles all up, made up of 3 tin tops and 5 open wheelers. We had 30-minute sessions each until numbers began to dwindle around midday where it went into “open pit lane”. The tin top group was me, a Boxster and the Honed GE8 Jazz which got a very impressive time with ace drive Pete at the wheel.
The car behaved beautifully, no issues in the logs and I was continuing to gain confidence. I lowered the pressures of the AD09s down to ~30psi hot and they felt a lot better than previous (~32psi hot). That said, I can’t stop thinking about grippier tires in the future, likely the new RE71-RZ or Nangkang CRS.
I scored some CEIKA brakes (XS size) with their “Sport” pads for a bargain. I was super happy with them, the pads feel great, comparable to my old ZONE TT pads from TM-Square/ZONE. The blue calipers look great too.
After a relaxed first session, I decided to push a bit harder on my second session, focusing on carrying and more speed through the sweeper. Reviewing the data and seeing the live delta to my NA PB, I saw that I was no longer losing time. This session felt great and set me up well to continue pushing into further sessions.
In the following session I finally defeated my NA PB, taking 1.2s out of it. My PB is now a 1:42.73 with an optimal in the mid-low 1:41s (it dropped further after this image). My main point of focus is now turn 10, dog leg.
As the day went on, I clocked a few more laps in the 1:42.7x but couldn’t drop the time any lower, only my optimal. Enjoy this pic of me feeling satisfied with myself 🙂
Unfortunately, I did not have the GoPro setup (location needs work), and the Garmin camera was not aligned, so no watchable footage from the actual PB lap. This lap was 0:00.03s off, close enough!
I also added some data from the Link, overlayed in RaceRender free, it was pretty intuitive; you can do a lot in the free version. I do need to turn down the frequency, 100Hz (0.01s) is far too much data. I also need to log something that makes aligning the data to a lap simpler. As I had never considered this, my only way to find laps was to look at the TPS%. Putting the log data into Google Sheets and analyzing it was quite the challenge; Google Sheets did not like 125k+ rows of data at all. With a few hours of work, I did manage to find what I think is the same data as the recorded lap, see below images from Google Sheets. First is the whole session of TPS data, second is what I determined to be the lap I was looking for [3].
The pads had no noticeable wear after about 30 laps, looking the same as when I installed them. I have purchased another set, ready for when they eventually wear. I was concerned about the bespoke pad sizing and limitation of 3 compounds but thankfully, they feel great.
