Made a very late decision to attend the COTA DE on Feb 24 & 25 (like 3 wks before the event). Had been debating about doing it or the DE at Barber Motorsports in AL in June after Parade, but found out the Barber event was the Porsche Experience vs a DE. Was also debating about COTA since I'm close to having the Spyder ready to sell but wasn't sure if I wanted to spend a bunch of $$$ on an expensive DE with $$$ still tied up in the Spyder AND March is an expensive mo for me w/ house ins and taxes due.
But I decided to channel my inner Joel Goodsen from Risky Business and say, "what the ****************".
For track prep, I needed to do an oil change, swap street / track pads in, summer tires on, and a tech insp. Got the track pads out of the box that I'd removed last fall after DE season was over. I obviously didn't look at them close when I took them off because there wasn't much meat left on them. At this point my concern was passing the tech insp, so I left the street pads in and had her teched. When it came time to actually put the track pads in, there was barely more pad than backing plate. Not what you want to start with at COTA, which is particularly hard on pads. Start looking online for replacements, and there's nothing available in street / track that can get to OMA in time for me to install. I found a set of Bosch oem pads on Amazon, so I figured a new set of OEMs would last me for the event. Got them orderd and installed in time. Did a quick brake bleed check for bubbles and was ready. The brake pedal was rock hard.
It was kind of a cluster getting thru registration and tech on Fri afternoon and evening, but I made it. They don't give you any pts for being early for either but I did get pts for having their stickers from 2015, 2016, and 2017 still on my windshield.
Speaking of 2017, I'd been watching my vids from then and wanted to make changes on 10 of the 20 turns. The biggest changes would be the 3-4-5 complex and 15. I wanted to late apex 3, which would give me a better line thru the 4-5 esses. I had been taking a conventional line thru 3, which got me in the wrong position entering 4. T15 is one of four more than 90 deg turns on the track. Previously I had been entering too shallow, requiring more turning thru the corner at a slower speed. I planned to hang out further right, thus reducing the turning deg required, and hopefully would be easier / faster. Not a racing line, but we're not racing.
During the driver's mtg, they say COTA has just done some repaving in the last 10 days on various parts of the track and we'd be the 1st group to rubber it in. Kind of funny b/c there was an 8-day Ferrari event there before us, but the joke was they weren't driving hard. To be fair, they were driving rental Ferraris under the agreement of 'you break it, you buy it'. So for the 1st session, I'd be dealing w/ unknown brakes, new pavement sections w/ unknown grip on a cold track, AND I forgot to mention I'd switched tire brands from Yoko to Bridgestones. That's a lot of unknowns for a 1st session.
My Solo 1 run group would be the very first grp onto the track. With all the potential unknowns, it was wise to be careful. The brakes immed felt weak - not hard, not soft, but required a lot more pedal than I normally used w/ my street / track pads. The new pavement sections had very little grip and they were at key pts of the track. There was dust that was coming up in these sections. I took it relatively easy the whole 30 min and never got a real feel for my tires. Thankfully, with all the run groups incl the club racers getting on the track and the sun warming the track, session 2 was better when it came to grip. I started dialing in the pressures on my new tires.
But with all my issues, I was a butter knife at a gun fight. My understanding of Solo 1 was it contained the lower HP cars with open passing, which was fine with me. But it seemed all the cars were practically race cars with big wings and racing slicks. My relatively stock car on street tires was not going to be doing a lot of slicing and dicing. And we had 50+ cars in my run group. I got a lot of exercise putting my left arm out the window pointing cars by. Regardless, it was still fun to be on the track, which I consider my favorite. I'd grid as close to the back of the field and hopefully get 2 laps in before the thundering herd overwhelmed me. Sessions 3 and 4 showed improvement, with me setting a w/e personal best in the 3rd session.
The 1st session on Sun had prob 40+ cars on the grid. I was getting closer to dialing in my tire pressures as I could go later into a session before the tires started to push. The Bridgestones needed a tad less air than the Yokos and I seemed to have found the sweetspot. I knocked a cpl of tenths off my w/e best in the 2nd session, as the fewer cars gave me more open track. Then in the 3rd session, I knocked a whopping 3 sec off my w/e best. A friend attending the club race asked me how I'd done it and I didn't have a very good answer. I just did it. He then said that's a lot of time and if I only knocked a tenth off later that I should be happy - it would still be a best even if by only a tenth. Good advice.
The 4th and penultimate session prob had 30+ cars. Much more open track and fewer thundering herds to contend with. I got a lot of good laps in, incl a new w/e best that was a few tenths faster than the session before and another lap that was my overall 3rd fastest time. Only 1 lap was slow, the rest were at or better than my best Sat time. With that kind of success, I decided to skip the very last session. Normally I figure I paid for track time, I'm going to use it. But I was getting tired, I'd accomplished a lot with the last session, I wouldn't want to drive hard in the last session and have something stupid happen that would affect my trip home, and skipping the last session would allow me to get an hr head start on the trip back from Austin to my sister's house in suburban Dallas. Like George Costanza, I left on a high note. Was glad to make it back to Dallas w/o issues.
Mon on the drive from Dallas to OMA, I had time to think about the 3 sec. The biggest factor had to be I trusted the brakes and drove hard throughout the lap. I also had the tire pressures zeroed in by then. The changes I made to my track approach were also working well - I was very happy with how I was lapping the track. 3-4-5 and 15 were much better. My changes thru 8-9 were also faster. And the smaller number of cars gave me more open track so I could focus on driving vs mired in looking at my mirror.
Here are a cpl of my vids. The first is Sun session 2 - good driving and lots of cars. The second is my last session - lots of open track so I could focus on good laps. Enjoy.
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Last edited by husker boxster; 02-29-2024 at 12:44 PM.
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