Joe's NA6

[daffyflyer]

And you can drive my car and wish you'd spent your money on engine mods..

And i can look at yours and wish id spent it on bling

The grass is always greener... by your powers combined...!

From one wheel whore to the next...
Get a move on with those wheels Jeo...!!!

That would be a pretty well ideal car for me, one that looked like Jeo's and had my new motor

[Jeo]

The new motor once its finished or as it is now but fixed?

[daffyflyer]

Motor currently in russells build room in a million bits

New engine when its all rebuilt and splinkly and ported and balenced etc.

[Jeo]

Went for lunch down the coast today with a few friends which was my first decent length run in the new seats. I can only agree with what others have said on this point but they are actually comfortable. My legs, lats and triceps were already sore as buggery when I got up this morning after a training session on Friday night, but after 4 hours of spirited driving they are no worse than when they started. As a whole I'm sure they don't hold you as well, nor are they as light as a 'race' seat, but they beat the hell out of the stock ones. Overall, I'm quite happy

Oh, and the drive wasn't bad either. Went through a few short showers on the way down, first time that's happened while I've had the roof down. Not much traffic even through we stuck to the main road and it was the last day of school holidays. Beautiful blue sky when we left Batemans Bay, nice warm weather the whole way over the mountain, black as anything once we hit Braidwood so I stopped and put the roof up. <5km down the road it was absolutely bucketing down. Couldn't see two car lenghts in front of you. Stopped raining just after we hit the federal highway, overcast and cold the rest of the way home.

Edit: And I just found out I may not be attending the club track day next week It's full and I'm on the reserve list. That suggests there's still hope, but I imagine I'll be on the ACT club run to Jugiong next weekend instead.

[Jeo]

And I'm back in Club track day at Wakefield next monday.

[Regie]

sh*t yeah! should be a good day

[Jeo]

Wakefield!

I attended my first track yesterday and had myself a ball of fun. Met a bunch of new people, got to put faces to interweb names and managed to catch up with a few others. Being a first timer I got given an experienced driver to take me out for my first few laps. Bill was a great teacher and helped emmensly. He drove my car for three laps explaining lines, braking points, etc, while I got to be a passenger. We then pulled back in and swapped places. First lap while I was driving I managed to spin on the fish hook. Was simply a case of thinking I was going to fast, dabbing on the brakes and around we went. In hindsight if I had of just kept going I probably would have been fine, but where's the fun in that? Did a few more laps with Bill's guidance. Didn't go particularly fast, just tried to focus on lines.

Next session I got let out on my own and again, tried to focus on getting my lines right rather than going fast. It was weird, I wasn't sure whether I was scared or excited, but once I started to relax everything got much easier. Russ grabbed me after this run and turned on the data logging function on my ECU.

Started aiming for some actual speed on my third run. Best time was 1:29. On any of the corners that required hard braking I kept feeling that my back end was quite skittery on the entry, but just figured I must have been doing something wrong. On my last lap on this run coming out of the fish hook I noticed a knock coming from the front left. Immediately my heart sank thinking I’ve broken something. The knock was noticeable the whole way back to the shed and matched the vehicle speed. I grabbed Russ and we had a quick poke around behind the wheel but all seemed to be in order. We ran with the logic of taking it easy on the first lap out next time and see what happens, maybe I just flat spotted a tyre or something. He also connected up his laptop to my ECU and looked at the data. Coolant temps and air/fuel ratios were consistently healthy, but beyond that none of the data was particularly useful.

Next time out on the track the knocking was gone so I started trying to improve my lap times again. Back end was still off under hard brakeing but I still just assumed it was me. Russ came to check on the knocking noise once I was back and it was then that he noticed why my brakes were acting odd. Turns out the last owner of my car decided it would be a good idea to upgrade the back brakes to NA8 specs, but left the fronts as the stock NA6. As soon as he pointed it out I immediately realised the difference between mine and the NA6 beside me.

I had a total of seven runs throughout the day and my times kept falling. On my 2nd last run I managed a time of 1:23.2. I’m fairly confident I beat that on my last run but left before I found out my time, will have to wait for them to go up on the website.


All in all I had an awesome day and learned heaps about my car. New front brakes will be coming very shortly and a new set of wheels that I’ve been after for a while now should fix the crappy tyre issues too. I don’t want this to become a regular occurrence as this is my only car and I don’t want to brake it, but if I’m still hankering for some more track time in a couple of months, I may end having to buy another car.

[rockitman]

Sounds like you had a great day!

[broady]

Sounds awesome. Are you going to upgrade your front brakes? Peculiar that someone would choose to upgrade the rears. Maybe the original ones were damaged

[Jeo]

Sure did rockitman

I'm not sure broady, I'm guessing they would have done it when the engine went in but really, who can guess why? Yes, fronts will be upgraded very soon.

[CoffeeBoss]

Good to see you on Monday Joe - looked like you ticked a few boxes off for your first Wakefield day, from what i could see, which were pretty much identical to my first Wakefield experience many a moon ago! :
- learnt stuff about your car and your driving
- spun at the fish hook
- left with silly grin and grand ideas about track day cars and mods

I call that a very successful day.

[Hammer]

Nice to meet you during the track day Joe.

I trust your first track day went extremely well? But someone once told me, that if at the end of the track day, you can still drive your car home, that's a successful day.

[Jeo]

Cheers guys. My goal for the day was really just not to break anything. A mate from uni has a 50% trailer home ratio from Wakefield with his MX6 and Daffy has just had boatloads of luck up there. As I had fun, learnt things and was still able to drive home, I'd certainly call that a successful day.

I think I'm going to try and get out to the next local hillclimb day and see how I like that next.

[daffyflyer]

Daffy has just had boatloads of luck up there.

Hey, ive been to wakefield 3 times and broken.. 3 cars.... oh...

[Jeo]