86Drift's first race

[86drift]

On the 4th and 5th of August I'll be competing in a round of the NSW State Hillclimb Championship.

It's at Ringwood Park which is north of Newcastle. If you're in the area stop in and check out the action.

I'm going to test how swaybar changes effect the times around the track. The plan is to get a baseline with the standard bars and then swap to the Whiteline ones. Then I can play with the adjustments on the new bars.

I'll take video and will write an update on how it goes on the track. Will I be the first person in Aus to race the 86? I'm beating the WTAC by a week

[motoboy76]

Might just have to pop in and have a look..

[crimespree]

keen to hear your impression of the whiteline bars...

[86drift]

Originally Posted by crimespree

keen to hear your impression of the whiteline bars...

So far so good. I love them on the street. But really keen to see what difference, if any, they make to my times on the track.

[86drift]

What a great weekend. If you get a chance to do a track day grab it with both hands. These cars make you feel like a driving god.

Now for how the weekend went. I tested OEM vs Whiteline swaybars.

On Saturday I did 6 laps on the OEM bars and set a best time of 35.95. I then went out with the Whiteline rear bar installed (on medium) and did a 35.62 within 2 laps. A good improvement. Understeer was greatly reduced and oversteer managed with the right foot. This would be a good drift setup and it wanted to drive sideways around the whole track :-)
On Sunday I did 4 laps with Whiteline front and rear bars (set on medium) and did a 35.33. Once again a good improvement. It was more balanced then with just the Whiteline rear bar. I then set both bars to hard and set a best time of 35.27. Setting the bars to hard made no noticeable difference in lap times. However it was more easily unsettled due to bumps.

As expected the thing holding the car back is the tyres. People in the know say a good set of semi-slicks are worth about 2 sec a lap. Since I was 1.8 sec behind the rx7 race car which won my class, I'm very happy with how quick it was.

[JiB]

Wow, you hardened the bars from medium and knocked 10 seconds off your time :P

looking forward to your next mods and track testing

[os86]

Originally Posted by JiB

Wow, you hardened the bars from medium and knocked 10 seconds off your time :P

looking forward to your next mods and track testing

I think its a typo. He states going on hard settings made no difference

Its impossible to shave 10 seconds with sway bars..

[JiB]

heh i know i know, clearly a typo, my :P didnt indicate enough sarcasm!

[Fussy08X]

hahhaha. saw that he went from 35secs to 25 seconds from just hardening the sway bars and was like OOFFTTTTT!!!!! lol. but then was like nah surely typo haha

[86drift]

Originally Posted by JiB

Wow, you hardened the bars from medium and knocked 10 seconds off your time :P

looking forward to your next mods and track testing

Damn I wish this was true

The fastest time of the day was 28.3 in an awesome Lola open wheeler.
Click here for pic of Lola

[LeftFootBrake]

Originally Posted by 86drift

If you get a chance to do a track day grab it with both hands.

Many thanks for the write-up! Sounds like you had fun. I'm curious about track time though. Looks like the type of event you participated in only delivered you around 10 minutes track time distributed over two days. I spend longer than 10 minutes just warming up on my iRacing simulator.

I'm thinking I will head to either Marulan or Wakefield for my first track days. I do worry about idiots sharing the track with me, though. I have absolutely zero interest in having my car towed home because of some dive-bombing "hero".

[86drift]

The runs were very short. 35sec of adrenaline. You spend the rest of the time watching and checking out all the other cars. Not a bad way to spend a day.

I've done a super sprint before and it wasn't too bad as you don't overtake (or get overtaken) very often. Still makes me nervous though. Most of my driving these days is in rallying where you get a lot of seat time and no-one around to punt you off the track.

When you do race there isn't any insurance, and if someone totals your car, tough luck. One of the reasons I do mainly timed events. I find competitors are much more friendly too as there's no bad blood due to multi-car prangs.

[86drift]

Time for a few pics.

[DriftEightSix]

Nice work dude!

what other cars were you up against?

also how much for full set of medium sway bars?