VIR with Track Advantage: May 2022
Minor tweaks for a big boost in confidence in the car
I was itching to get back to VIR after being there earlier in the month with the FSR-PCA, so signed up for the next one available which happened to be with Track Advantage.
Between the two events I added some 034 camber plates and got some Ferodo DS3.12 front pads to hopefully fix my braking issues. The camber plates were primarily to get tire edge-wear under control and extend the life of the tires since it was pretty clear I’d be doing a lot more HPDEs as this point.
Camber mounts are quiet aside from a minimal bit of added NVH(no clunking or noises though). We put a thin dab of RTV between the (brand new) strut mount bearings and the 034 camber mounts. Prior experience told me that hard plastic on aluminum was asking to spin/slip in relation to each other and make potential noises that some people complain of with these (would show up as a popping noise). This should make them "stick" to each other so that the only movement is in the bearing itself, as it should be.
It is also worth noting that I was seeing 260F+ oil temps at the last event, so I wanted to start keeping an eye on stuff as I knew as I was pushing the car harder, I’d need to improve the cooling system. I wanted to get some solid numbers on the intake air temps (IATs) vs ambient air temps (AAT), coolant temperatures, and oil temperature.
I used the OBDFusion app on my phone along with a VeePeak BT 4.0 OBDII adapter. It did work, though there are far better solutions for logging I’ll cover in other places of this website. Sampling rates were slow, but would work for the temperatures I wanted to see.
Lots of traffic, but still a pretty good weekend
I was running in the intermediate group, which may have been a mistake. This was an event with no novice/instructed sessions, and I think several who belonged there signed up in solo intermediate. I did manage to get a new personal best of 2:20.93, which in the heat I was reasonably happy with.
More importantly, I was getting a lot more comfortable with the car now that I could trust the brakes to not go soft. The new problem was now that it was getting into ABS super easily. The DS3.12 compound IS quite aggressive, but could tell that it needed something with more bite out back to balance the car out. It was much better than pedal going soft in my opinion though.
As you can see in the following videos, temps were up there. The stock intercooler definitely had a hard time keeping up in the heat, but was far better than I expected it would be. What was really interesting was how even in ~80F heat, the coolant never got dangerously high like many people claim happens. It was at this point I started wondering about the effects of aftermarket intercoolers on radiator airflow. This also made me question if larger radiators are actually worth considering or not.
With the above data collected, the next place of focus as far as the car goes is replacing the intercooler and getting a suitable track pad out back to balance the car out under braking.
