Sunday, September 20, 2009

Did we learn anything?

After the April race I posted a list of things we learned. Let's see how we did acting on them:

Get to the track early.

We arrived at the track at about 2:30 AM on Friday morning. Most of the good spots were already taken. We ended up camped one spot down from the primo one we had last year. Setting up our stuff and only getting a few hours of sleep kinda bites. On the bright side, we did have plenty of time to get through tech and do the practice sessions. Next race I want to get there when the gates open on Thursday night.

Sleep is your friend.

Besides the limited sleep from the drive up, we did great on sleep this year. We worked hard in the weeks leading up to the race to have a running vehicle, but no crazy all night sessions. I think we'll do even better next spring since the car is in decent shape.

Stock brakes suck.

Amen. The Integra brakes and Hawk HP+ pads did great. We started to get some vibration under braking up front towards the end of the race, so there's some room for braking improvements. We were able to finish the race on a single set of pads, and there's probably a couple more races in them.

Being slow makes you slower.

The faster car helped us out quite a bit in this respect. I felt like we could go with the flow of traffic, and on some of my stints later in the day on Sunday I felt faster than average.

Visibility is your friend.

The faster car allowed me to spend more time looking forward than backward, so this didn't feel quite as critical as it was in the last race. Still, we were able to get all of the stuff out of the back and our rear wing was mounted high enough to not block the view.

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