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Get your own Free Home PageI went to the Autospeed Wakefield track day on Friday. Am still grinning.
When I left Sydney it was a beautiful day, the sun was shining, there were just a few clouds in the sky, and everyone else on the road was heading in the other direction into work By the time I reached Wakefield park, it was pouring rain and blowing a gale. :0
I pulled into the racetrack about 10 minutes late, but luckily everyone else was later.
Of the cars there about half were WRXs. And the majority of those were STIs, rather than your common, ordinary sort of WRX that you get about the place. There was also a 22b (a 2.2 litre WRX variant. Same power (208 kW) as the STI (and as just about every other hot Jap car) but it needs less boost to get there so it has less lag and more low down torque. Makes you wonder why they didn't use the 2.5 litre block.
There was also a twin turbo liberty from the Fuji Heavy industries camp.
Most of the remainder were Nissans (yay!) But only one, a worked Datsun 1600, was near my price range. Other than two, worked, 180sx 2 litres, and a SSS 4wd turbo Bluebird the rest were skylines. About half of these were the boring old 2 litre turbo GTS-ts, HR32 and HR33 models (the curvy GTR looking ones) and the rest were more advanced pieces of equipment, GTS25ts, and of course GTRs, including a couple of HR33 GTR V-specs.
Other brands were Not that it was that easy to see all the cars as my eyelids kept freezing shut. Everyone discovered one use for a well raced GTR, you can huddle around the open engine bay to keep warm. As someone pointed out, "This is better than a fire, I may have to get one of these." It was also popular to wear the racing helmets all the time to stop your ears from freezing. Towards midday the rain stopped, but it got colder. I luckily had a spare flannel shirt in the car so I was wearing two, one over the other. And a helmet and clustering around a hot engine bay. The only time I was warm was in the car.
And how was the driving I hear you ask?
Well to start with it is important to note that a race track is much smoother and stickier than a normal road. Which is another way of saying that when it is wet it is much slipperier. Much, much slipperier. In my first attempt I managed to do only one lap in which I did not come off at least once. Leaving the track would also have been worse if there hadn't been BIG, LONG stretches of grass before you came to anything as solid as a tyre wall. You really had to be going very, very fast before you could slide for long enough to hit anything. Naturally some people managed it. A GTR managed to score some big scratches on the front bumper, but as this was just about to be replaced with one that had been modified for more airflow and a bigger intercooler the owner was not upset. The STI driver who crunched the entire LHD of his car, crumpling every panel, against a tyrewall, WAS upset.
I was not surprised that all the 4wd cars would beat me under these conditions.
Towards noon the rain stopped and the track got dry. My brakes felt a little bit spongy after one set of fast laps, but other than that the car held up well. I do need new rear tyres but they were due in a few months anyway. The twinturbo Legacy (Liberty) kept cutting out for no apparent reason, and one race prepared GTS skyline had it's airflow meter catch fire! It had to be towed off the track. I don't know how the guy got it home either.
I've decided the dominant characteristic of the Zed was oversteer. Of course in the wet even the Gemini had power oversteer in the first two gears at any time but in the dry the Zed would do so in the first 3 if cornering near the limit. In the wet the Zed would have power oversteer in 3rd in a straight line. This is not good going down the straight, but then the GTRs had the same issue. Once the track was dry I did much better and occasionally encountered cars (such as a GTS or Integra Type R) that I could go faster than. This is totally due to the drivers taking it even easier than I did, the other GTS's and Type Rs blew me away.
I was terribly disappointed with how the Type R beat me down the straight, having thought that a Type R had much the same straight line performance as I did, but when I got home and looked up the figures I found that it was supposed to be quicker, and it was. I was running standard boost for the day.
Leaving the track and going spearing off into the grass would have been far more embarrassing if there hadn't been all these STIs, EVO6s and GTR V-specs doing the same thing. Incidentally the GTRs do seem to handle more like RWD than 4wd, from what I could see.
Or at least it should have. The problem was that people were still coming off, and when they got back on again, they brought back all this mud and water with them. This was only at the tricky corners though. However with the track being dry the racing started to get a fair bit harder on the cars. A track with grip will wear out your tyres more. With the braking able to be harder the brakes get more of a hammering and now they are no longer sprayed with water they get hot. Likewise drivelines and engines.
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