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.