Heat Exhaustion!

I have weird memories of Sunday at TC1000. It was hot. I remember climbing out of the car after the second session and thinking - no more today. It was too hot to be driving in long sleeves/jeans/helmet and no aircon. Still - not a lot of places as much fun nor many I'd have swapped in its place. I hid inside the control tower for about half an hour soaking up aircon while draining about a liter of water after that second run. It helped a lot.

I'd got it in my head that it was slippery on the track in the heat. Tires were somewhere north of 240 but I was too lazy to check them in the heat after my runs. I remember having a lot of fun pushing the car around all day and catching my mistakes. I felt like I was improving a lot in terms of being able to catch a slide and I was enjoying the practice after my big ones at Fuji the previous Sunday. I felt I was getting better.

Looking at the video again in retrospect, I was pretty damn rough in places. I'm doing far too much steering corrections mid-corner, unwinding too fast and then re-winding again in places. I think I need to be more crisp and accurate in my inputs to go faster. I mean, what was I at at the end of this video coming out of the last corner?

My current setup seems to go from understeer to oversteer quite fast. I actually usually drive TC1000 on (damper settings) 7F/9R but decided to dial in more understeer by driving with 6F/9R. 6F meaning 6 turns on front dampers and 9 turns on the rear. The higher the number the softer the setting.

As I understand it, hardening the front will give you more understeer which is what seemed to happen. I noticed a big change on the center hairpin which this setting. Usually I can get the car to turn more quickly through that corner but this time it just wouldn't turn so easily. Previously though on the other setting it had been quite easy to lose the car on that corner. Somewhere in between is ideal. I need to understand these settings more.

Actually, I'm planning on getting the RE-Amemiya stabilizer set and spending my TC2000 session on the 28th trying different settings. Its 2 hours free time on the track so it should be ideal for this kind of thing and its about time I started exploring my car setup a bit more. It will also slow me down and allow me to concentrate on smooth driving again - something I really need to practice! Hopefully, the heat won't get to me again!

Anyway, enjoy my loony qualifying session video. Mad and all as it is, the lap times were actually not that bad for this session: 44.67, 44.60, 45.01, 44.92 and 44.61.