Wet/Semi-wet day at Ebisu Circuit. It was my first time there in the roadster. We had 5 sessions altogether. Only the first one was dry really. My best time of the day was around 1'14.699. Semi-wet or mostly dry it didn't seem to make much difference.
Looking at the videos, I was pretty cautious through the chicane. The rear end seemed very light on turn in to the left part which was a little disconcerting although I probably could have tried more different approaches to see what worked and what didn't. I also slowed a little too much around the first corner but I did find the car quite prone to over-steer on accelerating out of that corner also. Looking back I would like to try more keeping speed there. I should also have tried a few different things on the last corner to see if I could keep more speed for that cruel uphill. There are chunks of time left in this circuit yet. I'll try post more videos later.
One of the cool things (apart from the track itself) was that we were allowed to bring passengers aboard our car during the sessions as long as they had helmets and gloves. This was my first time to give some friends a spin in the car beside me on a largish circuit such as this. It was as interesting for me as I'm sure it was for them.
In a way, the car actually felt a little more balanced with someone in the passenger seat. The lap times didn't vary that much although I took it a little easier when I had someone beside me to be responsible for - particularly as the track got that bit wetter. I actually did a 1'15.2 with James in the car beside me :-)
Here is a video of me taking my mate Derek around for a few semi-wet laps.
2 comments:
Don't know if you have seen this
Super GT and D1 Drivers testing tyres at ebisu
1:10ish
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-AcD66qpz-A
Nice find Russ! I would love to try Ebisu in the dry again so I could attack the chicane as I was quite the chicken through there and suspect I lost a lot of time there. The 6 speed car would also be a lot better than my 5 speed up the hill you would retain more of the power zone on the switch from 2nd to 3rd and perhaps also hit 4th. I'd also have liked to try my usual dry pressures as I was running much higher pressure than usual because of the changing conditions. So much to improve on :-)
The interesting thing was the tires though. I would have thought that the Toyo R1R tires would would have performed much better! I don't know if the guy over-drove the car or what but they were way off the other tires. The others all seemed to perform quite well but the best seemed to be the AD07s which was quite interesting as they retained a lot of grip all the way to the finish where as the BS and DLs seemed to slide more and more as time went on.
Thanks again for the link!
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