SSCC Supersprint: Wakefield, 14th March 2010

I spent yesterday at my second combined club Supersprint - this one organised by the WRX owner's club, and held at Wakefield Park.

I'm fairly familiar with Wakefield now, so I thought I'd have a good chance of improving my times significantly - but was brought back down to size early on. It was drizzly in the morning sessions, and my driving would probably be best described as "dog's breakfast". I was missing too many apexes and braking markers, leading to some off-road excursions and generally average times. In short, I didn't adjust too well to the conditions.

In the last session before lunch, I tried to change my mindset. My aim was to hit my braking markers, hit apexes, and build speed slowly. It was much more successful - I was more composed and the laps were more fluent.

After lunch, it cleared up nicely and I aimed to build a little speed with each session. I went from a best of 1:17 in the morning, to 1:14's, and by the end of the day, a 1:12.9. What pleased me more was that in my final session, I did four laps back to back within 0.2s of each other, suggesting i'd found some of that consistency I lacked in the morning sessions. On a side note, a pair of gloves was an excellent investment - no worries about sweaty hands; a nice bit of extra grip.

The Yokohama tyres were tough in the morning. They're a relatively hard tyre, and it was almost impossible to generate any heat in them. In the warmer conditions with a little less tyre pressure, they felt better but still lacked bite.

I also got some help from one of the SSCC regulars, Shane. He has a beautiful red Corvette which he's been taking to the track for ages, and he's pretty experienced. He commented that my rear wing angle was quite agressive, and might be hurting my straight line speed. By agressive, he means that the angle of the wing relative to the airflow is large. If you reduce the angle, less downforce is produced, but also less drag. And so there is a trade off - more straight line speed comes at the expense of some downforce. Shane reasoned that I probably had an adequate amount of rear grip, so the extra straight line speed may be more beneficial than the extra downforce.

And so in the last session of the day, I flattened out the wing angle. My top speed increased by around 5 km/h. Success? Maybe. The important thing to note is that there are several variables involved. It may just be that I was getting a better exit on to the straight, and so my top speed was naturally higher. This is why I value consistency in laps too - if you can lap consistently, it makes it easier to identify whether changes to the car have been valuable or detrimental.

Shane also game me some useful info about a little device called a pyrometer, which i'll make the subject of my next post.

I also took a bit of footage of the afternoon sessions: