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More Nürburgring Videos And Pictures

JCviggen

By JCviggen
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JCviggen Newbie

JCviggen

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Another one of my bi-annual Nurburgring threads with video and pictures. The car hasn't been road registered for a while so I'm limited to rare trackdays on the Nordschleife. It costs about 700$ for the day but on the upside there is no liability to any 3rd party except for damaging armco. The more casual "touristenfahrten" days are a bit of an insurance black spot that could fuck up your life should you get in a serious accident and be placed at fault for causing whatever carnage would occur. So though it seems like a lot for a TD, it has its merits.

So it was a rainy day, very wet in the morning with a light drizzle. I didn't expect to have much fun with my wrong wheel drive swedish family car to be honest, but it turned out quite all right. I have to admit I had actually never (well 1 lap long ago) done wet laps on the Ring but it's quite a challenge and good fun. If anything the biggest problem was people with more expensive cars than mine driving so careful they were in the way all the time making it hard to get in the groove.

I was running semi slick tires front and back (new Kumho V70A front old R888 rear) and luckily there wasn't much standing water. There were 2 painfully slow sighting laps behind several pace cars in groups, taking around 20 minutes to get round. I was lucky to be right behind the instructor because even this pace was too much for some and -god knows how- someone managed to put his FWD car backwards into a barrier already.

I also heard an Ultima GTR spun during these sighting laps, but I'll cut him some slack for that.

After the sighting laps I went out to check out the grip at my own pace. The trouble with driving the Ring when it's wet is that they have an infinite number of surfaces old and new with different kinds of asfalt, whatever was on sale that week. This leads to situations where you brake into a corner, and then all grip is just suspended for 10 yards while you run across an older or newer layer. "scary" somehow doesn't quite describe it fully. And some corners of similar grade you can take twice as fast as others.

Aside from hanging the tail out all around the slow near-180 degree Wehrseifen corner the opening lap was mostly just really slippery. I came in to check how the car was doing and then went out for 2 laps.

I had to edit out a few bits to cram 2 wet laps into 15 mins. It starts off slow but gets better. First lap was 10:14 second 9:38 as the track got better and the tires warmed up. When I say warmed up, I mean the front tires. The rears stayed cold and that made the car VERY sensitive to sudden direction changes. A good example is the unexpected slide around 4:00

I suggest clicking through to youtube and watching in HD so that I didn't buy the HD cam for nothing :rolleyes:

Traction on warm V70A's in wet/damp was SO impressive it almost looks like its dry. It really wasn't, as is evident from the understeer/ABS sounds whenever braking or turning was needed. When it was very slippery it felt like the T-5R was unexpectedly one of the fastest cars on track, not counting the race teams who had come to practice.

Things gradually got dryer, and by late morning there was a dry line forming in some places. I went out again for 2 laps picking up some pace, however halfway through the second lap my ABS failed. Probably a sensor connection issue, heat may be involved.

Also the entire second lap was low boost because I had blown a fuse that the AVC-R was on. One thing to note is me very nearly ramming into the back of an Italian E46 M3. I shouldn't have read as much into his move to the right so I'll take the blame for the near hit but there were some god-awful Italians driving that day. One of them tagged an EVO that crashed, after which he just fled the trackday.

Lap #2 with the ABS issue and insane brake fade right after the BMW incident...I took it easy from then onwards.

It took some time to sort out the car in the parking lot, did a few more laps but nothing really fast. There's another lap in youtube of me following my friends 390bhp EVO but it's not all that different, had a very heavy passenger.

Emiel went through great lengths to climb onto a bridge to get a vid of the car passing on the straight (something around 140mph I think) thing is you can't really hear anything until it passes.

Then some pics from the day's official photographer (he wasn't cheap)

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No my turbo didn't blow up, just it can be tricky braking downhill over bumps when you're used to ABS and it's just not there.

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JCviggen Newbie

JCviggen

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what were you lap times?

Best one was 8:30 one of the above videos although some things went wrong with the car during the lap. But either way there was too much slower traffic to get near my best of 8:04

Beautiful. Was that a Lotus Evora behind you?

Yes there were 2 of them, both going very slowly afraid to fall off the damp track. I think you can see it in the first video somewhere in the second half.

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JCviggen

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The Quaife works great. Its just more help in the corners than in a straight line :) The gripper should still be better from a traction point of view. Only trouble with FWD and an LSD is that when you break traction in the wet both fronts will spin, sending the front of the car very quickly to the outside of the track or following the road camber.

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