The season is over, I won't pay $800 for LS in December!

Plans for 2009
- Fix front sway bar, one step stiffer
- New tires, NT-01 or RA-1?
- Front spoiler lip

Went to Laguna Seca for the ALMS event. Had an opportunity to get a tour of the Penske and Flying Lizzard paddocks. Amazing to see!
128 pictures below.

ALMS Laguna Seca 10/17/08

Summary

Went for another weekend to Thunderhill, excellent weather, nice people and a new track surface!
Had a blast of course.
The main thing was to dial in the new coilovers, went with the recommended settings 3 front and 3 rear to start with and decided that was too soft and not good front-rear balance.
But what a difference the new coilovers made in how the car handled!!! Like having a new car. So much easier to handle the car at the limit when the car isn't wiggling around.
Managed to get a new lap record (for me) of 2:13.7. ~ 1.3 seconds better than before.
Also had a problem breaking hard before turn 1, the car got all squigly. Looks like I need to tighten the front sway bar with this new set of coilovers. That might help.
I tightened the front to 1 (since I couldn't fix the sway bar easily) and left the rear at 3. Now the car handled much better, set a new record of 2:13.001. The car felt really good with these settings.
I still wanted to know how the car would feel with max stiff suspension, it felt like the rear was moving a bit and could need to stiffen up a bit. Well that didn't work at all, now the rear just got loose to easily.
I did a 180 in corner six as a result, was going in fast and the rear let go a bit, couldn't feed more throttle since there just wasn't track enough for that. So I had to let the rear go and travel backwards a bit :-) .
Managed to keep it on track at least ...
Talked to another guy about it and he said he had to get on the throttle even earlier when he stiffened the rear. So what he usually did when changing settings was to dial the speed back a bit, focus on getting early on the throttle and start picking up
speed as he got confidence with the new settings.

So, for next time I'll stiffen the front sway and dial back the front to 3 again and stick with 3 in the back. It's fun when you have settings to play with.

First session without instructor.

So here is the first video from Buttonwillow.
It's the second session, with an instructor showing me the lines and giving some hints.

So here is the first track video, sorry about the sound and the wire to my lap timer :-)
I'm chasing a silver 996 S, having a hard time keeping up with him, pissed off.
Afterwards I discovered he had RA-1s, and 60hp extra.