Honjyo 07/05/22

Honjyo was a great little circuit. Really good fun. Tight as hell, looming barriers to stop you being really naughty and some really difficult corners. Main aim was to practice trail braking which I managed to do with some success on the day. It was a great little circuit to practice on as the speeds were relatively low through the corners.

Honjyo was also very special because John was back in his new 8. Check out some of the photos up on flickr.

Oil cooler arrived.

The oil cooler kit from RE-Amemiya arrived. I decided to order it anyway as they couldn't fit it for me immediately. Fitting was going to cost 32,000 yen so I decided to invest that money in some good tools instead and learn a bit more about the car by installing it with the help of Richard. Just opened the kit and it looks pretty sweet. Cooler it self is about the size of an A4 page.

So its down to Super Autobacs this weekend to buy some tools and perhaps dyno the car while I'm there. Then I guess I'll have to wait until I'm back from China before I can install it some weekend.

Oil Temp

I recently installed the Racing Beat gauges for Oil Temp/Pressure and Water temp. Its been interesting watching at random intervals while driving around. First thing I noticed that water temp comes up way before oil temp comes up to temperature. I used to think I could just hammer it once the stock water temp gauge got to its usual position but it turns out that that is way too early. Oil takes at least a further 5 minutes or so. Normal ranges for oil temp tend to be between 80/90 degrees in normal driving.

My last two circuit outings though I noticed after a hard run, the temperature went over 130. The gauge maxes out at 138 degrees and it was around that mark when I glanced at it on the straight... That's not so good me thinks - at least not for extended periods.

Currently thinking I need a second oil cooler. I'm pretty much decided on the one from RE-Amemiya as its similar in price to MazdaSpeed one and the RE-Amemiya guys have a lot of good parts. Will see if they can fit it for me this weekend before Honjyo! Hope so. RE-Amemiya are out by Narita so its a nice little drive.

Tsukuba TC1000 - Spin Master

Richard and I hit TC1000 on 5/4. 5 fantastic sessions of 15 glorious track minutes each. There were 4 groups. I was in group A which was supposedly the ~45 second group. My fastest time thus far on the track was 53 seconds so I was wondering what I was doing in group A... The last time I was at this track it was bucketing down. It was also the first day I'd turned off DSC fully. So I was hoping to be about the 45 second mark.

Main aim of the day was to practice braking later into the corners. Unfortunately for me I didn't quite get the fact that this was a delicate art that involved gradually releasing the brakes through the corner with most of the hard braking still done in a straight line. I ended up spinning out 5 times in all - an average of 1 per session :-) What I was trying to do is called Trail braking although, I should have read up on it first before firing into it based on my limited understanding of what the Japanese instructor was trying to tell me. Brake too heavy late into the turn and out the back will come. Not brake enough and understeer off the corner. You only need this when you are going fast and thats when doing things like this bite the most... Tricky stuff this. Perfect track to practice it though. TC1000 is wide open, has great visibility and the speeds are relatively low. Also everyone in the A group was pretty awesome.

I was pretty happy at the end of the day. Although I never really got it right, I scored a fastest lap of 0'44.41 which wasn't too bad considering the heat. Drove 70 laps altogether! At 1039m a lap, thats nearly 73km of fully concentrated driving. Another RX-8 beat me with a 0'44.07 on the day. I hear that its possible to do a 0'42 in the RX-8 at TC1000 so I've a lot more work to do! Fastest time of the day was 0'43.106 which was an MX-5. Nice.