Salt said:
Carbonic135 said:
Fantastic, thanks. Wondering if you guys can give a recap on that race. At the start you kept up nicely with the two cars in front of you and kept the red one behind you well at bay. Then the two at the front pulled away and the red one behind you closed in heavily. But then Nic left the red one behind again etc. How was the temp of the car, was that a factor or perhaps brake fade? Just curious on how it went.
Thoroughly enjoy your thread, thanks.
Salt, thanks so much for the interest - its awesome the interaction we're having on the forum.
For reference, the cars that Nick was mixing it up with in the beginning was Shane Grobler in the unbranded white E36, Varish Ganpath in the Black E46, Matthew Wadeley in the white E36 "Polisiekar", and Nicholas van Zyl in the red 1-series hatch which was chasing from behind. Shane was running a 330 motor in his E36, was on old rubber but is a really experienced driver and car builder - Varish runs a 3.2 stroker (I think) in the black E46 which makes really good power, and he had dumped a lot of weight for this race by replacing all of his body panels with fiberglass. Matthew's car is a new build, but with M3 power is always going to be a challenge.
For the first lap or so Nick was able to push hard, and to be honest I was surprised that he was keeping up with the guys ahead of him, as the cars were all either more powerful, lighter or piloted by some impressive drivers. By the end of lap 2 temperatures had already started to climb, hitting 111-112 degrees. Nick knew he had no chance of chasing down the guys ahead of him (though he later passed Shane who picked up a problem), so he resigned himself to keeping the car together while keeping van Zyl behind him.
It is interesting tom see exactly where time is made up and lost: van Zyl was quick through the back part of the track, invariably closing up on Nick through turn 8 onto the start-finish straight, and having a nice clean line through turn 1, but he doesn't have the power to get close enough to set up a pass. The brakes on our car are AWESOME (Endless ME20 pads on standard rotors and calipers, RB660 race fluid). At R5k per set the pads aren't cheap, but you can see how much later we can brake into turns 2 and 5, which give us some great passing opportunities - check out my race video as well. So no, definitely no brake fade!
You will see that we get good drive out of turn 2 (the hairpin) onto the back straight, and start to pull away from van Zyl, but in order to manage heat Nick was shifting at around 5500 rpm up the back straight, which cost him around 10kph in top speed. Both of us still need to improve our lines through turn 4 - we're definitely dropping time here. We can again take advantage of the brakes into turn 5, and its then a short squirt before turn 6, where again Nick was short-shifting to try and win back some temperature. This, together with van Zyl's cleaner line through turn 8 allowed him to close up on Nick at that point.
Rinse, repeat...
My Turn
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