Ebisu Circuit here I come!

Ever since last year when I competed in the 12 hour endurance race in the Honda Civic, I've been dying to get back to Ebisu circuit in the roadster to see how it would like it. Finally, I've managed to hook up a date with 2 good mates and a tuner called Bozz Speed. Should prove for an interesting day out. Now if only Ebisu circuit wasn't so damn far away... Guess its not as far as Suzuka. Suzuka has to be next on the list you would think!

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.

Party Race 2009/5/5

As is usual, I neglected to make full use of my camera as the day swallowed me. Try clicking on the photo to find the precious few that I did manage to snap though.

May 5th celebrates my 1st year anniversary since I competed in my debut race. This year I decided to compete again in the Emblem race rather than dropping down to Clubman 2. The competition is fierce in Emblem usually and this year was no different as shown by the qualification lap times. Having missed all of the winter sessions on TC2000, I hoped to beat my personal best of 1'10.578 around TC2000.

The previous day on a crowded circuit I'd managed to get a 1'10.8 so I was very hopeful of scoring a 1'10 flat or there abouts and I pushed hard to get it. I managed to get a 1'10.2 on my first lap and a 1'10.1 on my second lap and never bettered it. I was quite happy with this as it was my best time around Tsukuba and I felt sure it would get me a good medium grid position.

Unfortunately, it was only enough to get me to 16th on the grid out of 17 cars!!! This amazed me as it seems the level is even higher this year. Imagine 16 cars qualifying all within 1 second of each other around a 2km technical circuit? Wow. Seems I'm gonna have to up my game next time out and get some more practice in.

As a quick aside to qualifying with a time of 1'10.1, I remember reading a quote in Going Faster about how a particular driver used image training to gain extra time around a certain circuit. On qualification, he did exactly that time but he made a small mistake which if he had avoided would have seen him an even faster time. Its funny because, on my best lap, I lost about half a second on the exit of turn 1 due to bad oversteer which in turn limited me to my best of of around 1'10 flat... There must be something to putting limits on yourself like that. Think faster to go faster out there!

On with the story. As lunch came and went, it started to rain and by the time it came to race it really was quite wet out on the track. I quite enjoy rain as I find it a good teacher. At the back of the bunch I was also quite content that I no longer had any pressure to preform and could just go out and enjoy the weather.

The first lap was hectic with traffic jams on each corner until the final corner. I was nearly in the back of a car as he braked suddenly mid 1st hairpin but I managed to avoid him. I was in 15th place at the end of lap 1. After the due care lap of checking out the grip, I had some nice slippage through Dunlop which made me remember why its a corner to be respected in the wet. 1 lap later, I should have remembered that as I was carrying too much speed into Dunlop when the car in front was slower than I expected and I lifted slightly mid corner only to lose the rear... Luckily though I recovered the car with only a loss of speed... oh and my 15th place... Damn back to 16th!

Having upped my adrenalin somewhat, I began attacking over the next 10 laps to try and gain a place or two back. Probably about 3 or 4 laps to go, there was a yellow flag at Dunlop and I picked up a place courtesy of car 62. Car 36 was dead ahead but proving very difficult to pass. I'd spent a few laps up his outside on the 1st corner, the 1st hairpin and the 2nd hairpin only to loose out due to being too close to him to accelerate cleanly as early as I wanted to.

On the very last lap, I took an aggressive Dunlop and got up on his outside on the 2nd hairpin where I stayed and some how he gave me the space I needed to exit cleanly on his back left corner on the outside heading up to the finish. Having gotten on the throttle that little bit earlier, I gained inch by painful inch all the way up to the final corner for a side by side up the outside. I felt that this was the thing to do as I had checked out the outside for grip earlier on and felt confident it would work out as long as he didn't spin into me. I felt pretty confident about this too though luckily enough :-)

So, elated, I drove over the line in 14th place. I'd never driven a race quite like it before nor learned as much as I did during those 15 laps of pure rush.

I can't wait for the next Party Race! Thank you Mazda for such a great car and the chance to race it! Thank you Brains for the superb organization and thank you D-Technique for the great support and having me on your team. Thanks to everyone who helped out and supported me on the day including Y & A. Finally a big congrats to all the race winners! Heros all, but watch out as I want my place on the podium back this year!

Tsukuba TC2000 - 09/05/02

Bit of a disaster of a day at Tsukuba today. 30 cars on the track and not all of them managed to stay on it all the time so there was quite a lot of yellow flags throughout my 3 sessions. Best time was 1'11.3 which I set in the first session even though I had nearly a full tank of gas.

Anyway, Monday and Tuesday await and I'm a little more ready now. This photo shows my new helmet paint to match the car. Side of the helmet is a wolf shape which if you stretch your imagination also reads TOM top-to-bottom. Yes - it requires that you think real hard about it :-)

The good news is RPMs worked great, so I'll see if I can put up a video if I have time later today.

Karting again in Chiba 09/04/26

I still haven't found my way to TC2000 since the last race. I haven't been avoiding it... just worked out that way. I was supposed to go on the 25th but it was a very wet day so I canceled and ended up going karting on the 26th instead.

Karting is such a blast particularly when you get a nice handling kart which just does what you want it do do. Even it wild oversteer moments if you are quick enough it comes right back although you do lose speed that way :-)

Anyway, thought this was a decent photo and it does show my new helmet paint job which I haven't blogged about yet. I'll take another photo of it when I put the darker visor on.

The good news is weather for the rest of the week and the beginning of next week is looking fine as I'm due to hit TC2000 on the 2nd, 4th and 5th :-)

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!