"Mr. Toad" at Laguna Seca (October 2019)"Mr. Toad" at Laguna Seca (October 2019)
 Ready to start the day! |
 
 Hanging out with friends |
 Ok, you're faster |
 Track rat |
 Panting after a workout |
 
 Photo shop, with Dito's dogs |
 Awesome license-plate frame |
 Cooled and loaded |
 Best lap |
This was my 42nd track day (the answer, right?) and tenth at Laguna Seca. It was my first time here with new and better Nitto NT05 tires. They performed well a month earlier at Thunderhill but Laguna Seca is far more familiar so provided a better comparison. I was rewarded with my first lap time under two minutes, an average speed of 67.1 mph for the best lap.
This video (also on YouTube) shows the 1:59.280 lap along with the following lap, which was less than half-a-second slower. The vertical histogram at the left shows throttle position; the target to its right shows two-dimensional acceleration. The two horizontal bars at bottom left show RPM and the turbocharger's boost pressure, with the numeric values to their right. At lower right is a map of the track showing the current track location in the video. (Video from the Track Addict app with additional data via a PLX KIWI 3 OBD adapter.)
I again wrestled with understeer coming out of turn 2 (the Andretti Hairpin), and started to encounter it in turn 9 as well. The shift points I settled on in June continued to work well so no changes there other than one forgotten downshift. It's remarkable that this car can cover so much of Laguna Seca in fourth gear.
I started to work on turn 6. It is a faster turn than it seems so I've always lost a bit of time there, and since it's an uphill dash from there to turn 7 it's an especially bad place to give up speed.
Turn 8A (The Corkscrew's exit) also got some attention, trying a tighter line to give me a faster run into turn 9.
In the pits, I was parked back-to-back with a 2006 MINI John Cooper Works GP and since I'll be driving a MINI next month I talked to its owner a bit. Elias was in the same group and was eager for some hints as it was his first time at Laguna Seca. We ended up following each other and our cars turned out to be closely matched, with his MINI handling a little better in the turns and my Mazda having a bit more power in the straights. That made for some fun as we tailed each other until other traffic interfered.
The biggest disappointment came at the end of the day: my
EBC YellowStuff
front brake pads, less than two months old, were down to bare metal
and took out the rotors with them. Laguna Seca is brutal on
brakes but I started with more than 50% which should have sufficed
for more than one track day. Fortunately, the good folks at
Helming's Auto Repair
squeezed me in the next day and had Mr. Toad
back on the road in under 24 hours.
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Copyright © 2019-2021 Karl L. Swartz. All rights reserved. |
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