Finally Suzuka!

Suzuka, Suzuka, Suzuka - how have you evaded me for so long?

I really wanted to try Suzuka last year but never got around to it. It's quite far down the road at 390km door-to-door and its not a cheap circuit to run. Finally on Feb 25th I took 2 days off work especially and headed down for 2 x 1 hour sessions.

The weather was perfect and myself and a good friend drove down, enjoyed eel on the way and stayed over at the track hotel. We talked about the next day over dinner and what would await us. It was doki-doki on drugs by the time the sun rose again and drove onto the track for the first time.

The first thing that struck me was the narrowness of the track and the closeness of the barriers. Every corner was new to me and even driving slowly in the first laps after a pace car, the car was easily upset under the unusual braking, side-to-side loading and off camber curves that it threw at you every step of the way.

The first time I took the 130R without the pace car, I took it at 120kmph and grinned at how much space I still had left on the circuit. Towards the end of session 2, I'd got that up to around 160kmph but it still scared the crap out of me and made me giddy driving towards it approaching 180kmph knowing it was coming.

My favourite part of the circuit was the S curves and the gyaku curve. I guess that was because the speed was more manageable through there in terms of what I was used to. The first corner and spoon were really difficult for me and I didn't really get them yet. The corner entry is so difficult, I over slowed every time.

Anyway, here is some footage from the last 3 laps. I managed a fastest lap of a 2'45.6 but there is definitely a lot more time in there once I slept on it.

Back at Fuji!

Delighted to return to the track and a glorious day at Fuji with some good mates. What better way to celebrate such a day! It had been ages since I'd been around Fuji so I was very rusty in the first session and under-steered off the track on a few of the harder corners like Corner 13, Netz and the last corner. I soon got back into my rhythm though and got some decent 2'13 times.

My previous best time around Fuji was a 2'13.0 so I'd been dying to beat that. I got a few 2'12s during the day the lowest being a 2'12.776 which was enough to satisfy me for the moment but I want more... I mean - why can't I get a 2'10?

The car felt excellent on its new tires. Alignment was perfect and the car handled very nicely. A couple of places in particular though, I can't seem to get right. Before I discuss, here is my fastest lap so far.



There are 3 corners I have trouble with (ignore the others for the moment):

The hairpin - I take this corner in second. I've tried many a time to take it in 3rd but nearly always I go sailing off the track on the exit with under-steer. The lower gear seems to afford me so much more car rotation prior to the corner that I can nail the exit but feel I'm wasting time with gears as a result. Hmmmm.

Corner 13 - This is another one like the hairpin where I just seem to fly off the track with understeer if I take it in third. I want to go faster here and can feel its possible but I don't know how to make the car turn in yet with more speed in 3rd.

Netz - This is an important one as in a low power car like mine you can lose quite a lot of time by over-slowing up the hill. I hate when I over cook this corner as the rumble strip is soo damn rough it feels it cool tear me apart. I've only got this corner right a few times and it feels magical when you do. Haven't done that lately!

The other corners I feel I'm not doing too badly though or rather I know I have to improve, but it seems like just a little extra effort would do it and it wouldn't be something new like the other corners seem they would be. Swallow a brave pill and concentrating hard should do the trick.

Anyway, hope you enjoyed the video!

Party Race 09/09/05 - Video

After much thought, I decided to put up a short video of the incident from the last race.

SSPark Video

Had a great time at SSPark. I've been rather busy recently so its taken me a while again to create some footage to sum up the 2 days.

The first day we worked on 3 separate areas of the gymkhana area. We had a big open area with cones where we could do anything we wanted to practice like handbrake turns, small circle drifting, figure of 8s etc. Another area, we concentrated on faster turns and speed control and the last area we concentrated on a tight timed part of the course. We also combined the 2 last parts together and did one big timed attack at the end. It was wet for my session which was a lot of fun.

My brake problem happened again on the first day where the peddle would get hard after a lot of hard braking. Kato-san repeated it also so I know I am not mad. He said it also happened in his car and speaking to some others, it happens in their cars sometimes also, mostly after ABS is enguaged under hard braking. Hmmmm, so I guess, I just cannot use ABS in the roadster as a result in order to be sure of stopping when required. Not so good.

To get back to things, the second day we did all the same things as the first day but the weather was very sunny and it made the day very hard indeed! This time we spent all afternoon attacking the bigger course in 4 groups. I managed to get a 1'03.9 in the video run below (although the TraqMate data shows it as slightly slower due to me setting my own start/stop position on which it basis its timings.

The footage is just a combination of 2 last runs of the day. One is Kato-san and one is me. Also shown is a TraqMate generated GPS map showing both of our lines and progress around the gymkhana run. Its rather cool to see where and how we differed and what effected the speed and what didn't. I think you could probably look at this and go out again and do an even faster run.

Ebisu East 5/31 another video

Here is another 3 laps from Ebisu as the course was drying out and I was on my own in the car so I could go a little faster.

Ebisu Circuit (East) 09/05/31

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.

Party Race 2009/5/5 Video

While I am not sure if it is totally allowed to post footage from the Party Race, I guess 2 laps won't hurt anybody and I've been wanting to show off the new RPM input into my TraqMate video setup.

Anyway, here are two early laps from the rather wet race. These were not my best laps for sure but they are a little exciting none-the-less as on the first lap of the video, I just got away without spinning the car through Dunlop and unfortunately lost a place in the process, followed by a faster lap trying to catch people up :-)

Anyway, enjoy the footage and don't get splashed.

Adding an RPM input to TraqMate

The TraqMate unit provides a wire whose sole purpose in life is to hook into a tachometer feed and tell you how many RPMs you are doing. By hooking in RPMs, tire sizes, gear ratios etc you also get some other info like what gear you are in, what HP/Torque your car is producing. It also makes for more entertaining videos as the rpm needle should finally move!

After asking around and gathering the required info on how to connect that wire to the car, I finally got together with my good friend The FeatherKing and hooked it in.


Traqmate Display Unit showing the live RPM feed.

It all turned out to be quite easy after we had TraqMate hooked up to the cars power/ground. The key is the following diagram which shows where to connect the TraqMate wire to. The target wire is marked TA and is color coded Yellow/Black.


The PCM is on the roadster is located under the airbox and once you get the airbox off (and disconnect the battery etc), you see something like the following. The red arrow shows the 2nd wire from the left on the top row where we hooked into.


Once we'd tapped the wire and tested it to the TraqMate unit by setting the car as a 1 cylinder car in the TraqMate car setup, it all worked and we needed to find a way through the firewall from the engine bay into the cabin where the TraqMate unit is kept. This also turned out to be quite easy and we found a nice path using the same access hole which my gauges were using. The arrow below shows the place.


Finding where this hole came out in the cabin was another thing... I forgot to take a photo of this part but its basically deep in the passenger footwell and higher up than you expect.

The following photo shows where I have both the TraqMate Sensor Unit and ChaseCam stored under the passengers seat. It works out quite well with some heavy duty velcro sticking them both down.


I'm getting really fond of the ChaseCam unit even though I am officially still testing it. The camera mounts nice and low and the units mic is out of the wind unlike when I had my conventional handy-cam up there on the rollbar.


All I have to do now is hit the track and get some proper footage! Next track day is May 2nd and of course the Party Race is coming up on May 5th. Wish me luck!

Creating a video with TraqMate

I've been wanting to upload a TraqMate video of March 10th at Fuji for sometime now but I thought it would be fun to show a little demo of how easy it is using the TraqMate/Chasecam combination to pull out a video of your best lap of a certain session. So here it is...



Two things wrong with this video of course... One is that the video capture program that I used to capture the video from my desktop doesn't actually show the video that the TraqMate software actually shows for some reason. It does show the other videos though which is a bit wierd. But anyway... The second thing is that I was too lazy to do sound :-)

So - once you do all that, you basically end up with your video file... It's so easy. No more editing or not much anyway depending on what you want to do. The video I made in that video is this one... Its not actually my fastest lap but it's not so slow either :-) I'm quite the happy camper with my purchase!



Enjoy!

Tsukuba TC1000 - 09/03/01

I'm rather late about posting an update on TC1000. Needless to say I had a great time and it was great to be back in the car again and to put it through its paces. Before going though, my tires were in bad condition from the last endurance race last year. The front tires were pretty badly worn so I decided to try using 2 rear tires from my spare set on the front and to see how that went. The rear tires don't wear so much on the roadster compared to the front so it seemed like a good idea to save some money.

So as well as needing to wear in new front tires, it was also my first time with the Chasecam and TrackMate setup. I was looking forward to trying that out. Tires proved to be quite a challenge for the first 2 sessions with lots of under-steer followed by some over-steer. TC1000 is not a bad place to enjoy a little over-steer though as its quite safe and I was soon having a lot of fun.

I managed to post my best time at TC1000 which is 0'43.847 some 700ms faster than my previous best. The weather had a lot to do with that I think as the temperatures were still quite on the cool side of things.

Unfortunately, I was in a bit of a rush to setup the camera and the footage is all sideways as I didn't check it before recording. Shame on me! However, TraqMate worked flawlessly and gave me some interesting data to look at. The most interesting thing was comparing 3 other drivers of my car against each other and seeing the differences in lines, braking etc. I've prepared a little video which I captured from TraqMate to show off this cool feature.



A note about the video. The car is my car. I was the only person in the car when I was driving where as I was in the passenger seat for the other 3 drivers. I'd estimate the car was therefore about 60kg lighter when I was driving it hence acceleration is a little better. Tyre conditions and fuel loads were also getting better with the green driver having the worst of it and the red driver having the lightest fuel load and probably the best grip as I'd wore the front tires down nicely.

You can really see where my strengths and weaknesses are. I need to work on my braking mostly. I think I'm engaging ABS too much as I take too long to slow down on the first hairpin. I also lose time under braking into the first section of the last corner. The GPS really shows how the lines differ too. So lots of ideas for what to try out next time I visit TC1000.

Party Race 08/09/20 - Video

Finally I managed to get the time to get the video of my last race out of the camera and up on the Internet. I learned a lot from this race and even though I was at the back it was one of the most enjoyable races so far. I made a huge amount of mistakes as seemingly all of my smooth driving was forgotten and replaced with a mountain of under and over steer showmanship. If anyone was behind me they probably would have been scared out of their mind at the rate my back went out during these 20 odd minutes. The only reason I made it around in one piece is because the roadster is such an awesome handling fun car. Well done Mazda and well done D-Technique on setting it up for me. Now I just gotta fix my driving and go faster :-)

So without further ado, Enjoy the show!

Party Race 08/07/27 - Video

Ok, finally edited the video from the Party Race. It shows the formation lap through to end. Enjoy! Not much to see this time though as I had a pretty uneventful pole-to-win victory :-)

SLY Video 08/07/05

Here's footage from my last session on SLY. After an easy out lap, I found Dai-san in his AE86 drifting around the outside of the corners for a lap or two before giving him a little more space and also dropping back so I could get a fast lap in. Some where along the way between fast and rest laps, I found Aki's Mines GT-R R33 behind me with Sunako-san at the wheel. I left space on the inside on the last corner and sure enough, he popped through and the chase was on. That GT-R is fast! I probably pulled one of my fastest laps trying to keep up and it was great to watch as the machine buried into the road ahead and left me for dead. What a cool way to end the day. Btw, sorry Miquel - I would have tried to follow you for some footage too if I had of realized it was the last lap of the day as I was trying to take an easy lap...



Anyway, here's the footage. Enjoy!

Fuji Speedway video from 08/05/30

Finally got some footage online from last Fridays session at Fuji. The video shows 4 laps altogether. The first two laps are from the 1st session. Although I managed to get a few 1'15s in the first session, I was under-steering quite a lot mostly because of turning in too late. The next 2 laps although on a damper track, show the same lap times but with improved turn in leading
to less under-steer. These laps are from the beginning of the 4th session before my video cut out. The tires are probably making a little too much noise so I probably have to work on silencing them a little perhaps. Hmmm. Can I find 3 more seconds? How many more seconds are in there I wonder. Going to be fun finding them! Enjoy the video!

Party Race 08/05/05 Video

I finally had the time also to cut the video of the race and add some comments. Feel the pain with me as I stuffed the start and got passed by 5 cars before the first corner. Yikes... This video shows the formation lap, followed by the 10 lap race. Enjoy!

TC2000 08/04/22 - video

Here is footage from the 5th session of the day. Track was open so was able to attack and learn as much as I could. The RE11 tires do very well. I still have a lot of work to do on most of the corners but now that I'm getting used to the car again, I should be able to concentrate more on my lines and driving technique. Anyway, here are a couple of laps... Enjoy!