Track Day - Donington 2nd June 2014

Attended a track evening at Donington Park with Leon, had a great time catching up with a group of fellow MNR owners. 

On track I managed a best time of 1:28 with a passenger in the car compared to a previous best of 1:35 solo from my last outing. Feeling a lot more confident with the car, but there is plenty of opportunity for further improvement.

Feel that the car feels a little over geared with the 3.14 differential and takes a while to rev out, possibly a 3.38 is a better choice for a relatively stock Hayabusa.

This time I managed to get the GoPro working and I've attached some of the video's of the evening's track action.

Towards the end of the session there was some smoke coming from the exhaust area which turned out to be the TDC plug had come loose and fallen out. This then caused a small amount of oil to spay onto the exhaust. Luckily it was nothing serious and I replaced the plug.

Sighting Lap:

First Session:

Ride out with Chris Forster:

Chris Forster driving my car:

Ride out with Leon Morrell:

Track Day - Donington 6th May 2014

Attended my first Track Day with the MNR at Donington Park. Had a really enjoyable day where I spent time to learn how the car handles. To start with while the track was still wet, I left the car at road setting with the suspension (3 clicks front and 6 clicks rear).

When the track dried out and I gained a little confidence I changed the damper settings to 6 clicks front and 10 clicks rear, must say that the car felt really well planted with very little body roll. Tyre pressure wise I went with 16psi front and 18psi rear with cold tyres.

One big concern on my mind was noise, I didn't get black flagged so during the afternoon session I spoke to the guys in the control tower to measure my drive by levels. On the pit straight I made sure that I used the full rev range and shifted at 10,500 rpm and pushed as hard as I could. The noise reading over 6 or so laps was consistently reading 94db and one at 96db. I'm pleased with the results.

When I was revving out the engine and changing up at redline the oil temp went quite high up to 100 Deg C as I shifted lower down the rev range the oil temp reduced to around 90 Deg C. Need to understand better how high I can push the oil temp before causing a problem or look at cooling and see if the Laminova cooler is up to the job.

The Race Technology DL1 logger worked really well. I managed to capture my sessions on track, I got detail of lines through the corners and also some lap times. The data analysis software is quite easy to use and gives a good insight in to the detail. As a first time this will be a benchmark for me to progress from. 

I tried to use my new GoPro, but this was an absolute failure as the camera decided to randomly stop recording after 20 - 40 seconds so no video clips this time. Need to look at this to see whats wrong.