> On Aug 22, 2022, at 8:35 PM, John Francis <jo...@panix.com> wrote: > > > (to be strictly accurate it was a weekend at the races) > > Last weekend I accompanied Larry to a club motorsports event > at Sonoma Raceway. Larry was driving his Miata, and I thought > this would be an ideal opportunity to test out my new camera. > (One reason I bought it was to give me a lighter camera bag > to carry along when I was photographing motorsports, but this > was the first time I actually got to try it out for that). > > <http://www.panix.com/~johnf/PDML/GESO/LarryHavingFun.jpg> > > (Olympus E-M1X + Olympus 40-150/f2.8 @ 150mm, 1/200 sec @ f/16) > > I not only got to try out my new camera - I got to ride around > in the other seat a few times. This was a lot of fun, but by no > means uneventful!. Part way through the first session we lost > all the brakes. (As I remarked to Larry afterwards, just about > the last thing you want to hear the driver say is "Oh sh*t!") > Fortunately this happened at a part of the track where there > was plenty of room to slow down.
I’m pretty sure that the “Oh Shit” comment was when someone passed me in such a way that I had to make an evasive maneuver lest I hit him at the apex, not even on the same day as we had fun with the brakes. My first couple sessions they were getting a bit softer than I expected after a couple of laps, since I had added brake vents and put on more aggressive, though not full on race brakes. But it is a street car, and I didn’t go for the full on race compounds. In the third session they were getting much worse, much quicker, so I pulled into the hot pits, and that was when the brake pedal went to the floor. It turns out that my recently replaced right rear caliper had a manufacturing defect. Oops. Fortunately we were able to get a replacement caliper at the O’Reilly in Novato, 15 minutes up the road. Unfortunately that was after the final session of the day. Sears Point has changed a LOT since I last drove it regularly, and the last time I drove it one day 8 years ago, before that about 15 years. I also haven’t been on track at all since November 2019, on race tires since about 2010, and never in this particular car. This weekend was pretty much spent getting acquainted with the car, reacquainted with the track, and trying to remember how to drive. In short, Saturday’s times were almost as good as I used to turn in my Honda Station Wagon or my Ford Cortina. Sunday I started sucking less, and the best lap of the session times show which session I actually seemed to remember how to drive. I used an app called trackaddict to log my laps. It’s pretty impressive, I spent a fair chunk of coin on a Valentine G-Analyst back in the day, and in addition to recording laps using GPS, and OBD-II, it’ll also take video with the phone and the videos show the “g-analyst” acceleration circle. If I read the data right, it seems to say that my tires are good for 1.5 g’s. I definitely need to better learn how to use that app. I also need to learn how to process the videos from the gopro I bought last week also. While I’m still leaving a lot of speed on the table by simply not putting my foot all of the way to the floor for enough of the track, I am pleased with my improvement in “best laptime of the session” over the course of the weekend. Saturday session 1, no data. 8/20-2 2:23.627 8/20-3 2:26.500 Sunday 8/21-1 2:24.907 8/21-2 2:20.028 (with passenger, generally costs about 2 seconds a lap) 8/21-3 2:14.604 8/21-4 2:12.390 -- Larry Colen l...@red4est.com -- %(real_name)s Pentax-Discuss Mail List To unsubscribe send an email to pdml-le...@pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
