Still catching up on blogging here….
Another awesome day at Waterford Hills.
Spent time continuing to work on evicting FWD habits. Spent lots of time on not braking (again). Getting speeds up and working on my own brain.
The Azenis are very good, but I could feel the left front rolling up a bit. I was down to 20psi (cold) in that corner with about 25 RF and 35 in the rear. WHRRI eats up front lefts on all cars. I could have probably dropped the LF even further. The tyre is visibly heat cycled hard – getting a bit furry. Lots of rolls of rubber around the entire circumference of the one solid band of tread. I could feel the rolls building up in certain corners. That’s a super new experience and I love how communicative the car is about what is going on in various places. It was a really hot day (temps 90+°F) and I could feel a bit of greasy trying to come in at the ends of the sessions. But just a tiny bit, not enough to worry about. These will be fine for Gingerman when I head out there next month. I’ll be at the CGI day and have spent the extra cash to get an instructor for the day, even though I got booted from novice.
One thing I’m starting to understand is that there are no truly bad tyres for this car. There are sticky tyres and not-sticky tyres, but all of them can be driven with the right attitude. I had the Michelins back on briefly trying to track down a noise (Brembo’s crappy PWI!), and found that since my first good day at WHRRI, the lack of grip was far less annoying. I felt a lot more in control of the car whether I had traction or not and was way less bothered by the tendency of the tyres to give up. So basically the driver is the fail, not the tyres.
ie – the driver needs more training.
Must do more track days! Oh, darn.
Then went home and spent the better part of 30 hours working on my son’s #RustyMR2. Will wrap that up after work today.