NASA weekend at Thunderhill 5-6 April 2003

I had a good time at Thunderhill this weekend. My hotlap was acting flaky (flakily?) all weekend, so I don't have a lot of laptimes. The negative camber bushings I installed seemed to help, I want to put the lower ones in. I'd also like to get the next size larger sway bar. While I don't seem to have knocked as much off my best time as I ahd hoped, my last group 4 (open passing) session, after my third lap, all of my times were within a second of my best lap ever.

Both of my students drove Suburu WRX's. Only my student from Saturday hangs out on i-club, and that is mostly on the tire/wheel forums. If you want to make a WRX work on the track, you need to learn trailbraking.

Scott Neville posted a lap of his following me around the track. Apart from my blowing my line in turns 3 and 4, my line doesn't look too bad: all his videos
him following me, 10 Meg file

I just had a chance to check the video tape for my lap times in the last fast session. My passenger was a slender woman, so it was less of a weight penalty than with some of the huskier guys I've had a passngers. At Sears Point and Laguna, a 200 pound passenger costs about 2 seconds a lap. I didn't have a chance to carefully check stop the tape at exactly the same spot on the track so I only have the times to seconds, not hundredths, for most of the laps but passing the start of the pitwall on the tape, the time counter read:

I also looked at the last couple of laps as I passed S/F:

Pitwall S/F

ctr lap counter lap


31:38
34:08 2:30
36:33 2:25
38:56 2:23
41:19 2:23 41:28.13
43:40 2:21 43:50.08 2:22.05
46:03 2:23 46:12.29 2:22.21

So, even with an extra 120 pounds in a car, I was still pretty close to my previous best ever time of 2:22.56 (and that was only one lap out of the whole session (the other laps that session were all about 2:24). While there are still several places I'm not doing it quite right (9, 10, 11, 1 and 6 are my worst), I am pleased to see that once I got up to speed in that session, all my laps were within about a second of each other, so I'm starting to be reasonably consistent again. So it looks like I've got the worst of the rust knocked off my driving,

I don't know if/when I'll be able to get any of my own video footage on the web but I hope to transfer to VHS soon.


Copyright (C) 2003 Larry Colen
Most recently modified by lrc at Tue Apr 08 23:47:25 PDT 2003