Second track day
After a successful first day I decided to move forward, gut the car and transform it into a full race car.
I added some new mods to address potential cooling issue, even though my track day was actually happening at night, so I did not really test much of the cooling. The shop added Mishimoto oil cooler and radiator. The oil cooler sandwich plate was leaking after our first session. Quite deceiving for a Mishimoto kit. We had to clean the fitting and add some nylon tape, like in your good old bathroom
. The fitting should be of better quality at that price point, but at least it stopped leaking.
During the first lap of the first session one my passenger fender plastic liner flew of... certainly some defective plastic rivets. Also the newly installed APR carbon fiber brake ducts where not ducted yet, so all the air was pushing the fender liners, that could also explain it, even though the driver side held fine all day.
Aside of these two small incident, the second day at the track was a blast. The car ran all 5 sessions without problems. I spent a couple of time fighting some other FRS in stock form, and my car was just as fast in the straight lines so I assume my engine is running the way it should. Car drive straight as an arrow.
Oh yes one little thing was not working... the ABS :S
Since the removal of the steering wheel and a couple other devices during the gutting, the ABS and traction control are missed in action. Traction control is not very useful at the track and I always disabled it, but the ABS, was a tremendous help.
During my first track day I was able to punch the brake really hard and get a fantastic stopping power with no wheel lock and not even ABS pulse. This time around, I can tell you that the ABS was really doing its job because I had a couple of wheel lock at high speed and with the slick tires, there is no feedback whatsoever when you lock the wheels... aside of the lack of braking.
During my first lock I thought I ran out of brakes, and the grass was getting closer than I'd like it to be, luckily I was not driving 10/10 and i had plenty of margin to release the pedal and re-apply the brakes. But it took me a whole second to remember that the ABS was disabled, there was no tire squeezing, no smoke, no weird behavior, nope, just driving straight...on ice
I was luckily to not flat spot the tires ! After that I tried to take it easy but still I did 2 or 3 more small wheel locks at braking level that to me felt inferior to what I was doing when the ABS was active, not activated, but with the computer helping me out
.
I really hope we can fix that problem asap, it is just not something adding value to the driving experience.