The day started off a little rocky. It turns out when you work on racecars until midnight for days and days on end, you forget simple things like putting in the bolts for the frame of the splitter :(. Luckily the damage was not too bad, it tore the front nutserts out of the bumper cover (never ment to hold the downforce of the splitter, just to close the gap in the body pieces), and scraped the front of the splitter for an entire lap reshaping our nice carbon lip. Oh well, sh*t happens, we repaired everything and the day went on. Maybe one day we will be well funded enough to not have to work on the GTR till all hours of the night. Working on it in the day would be quite a novelty.
We finally got out on track for our first full session of the day and were VERY excited about our temps. It was about 98 degrees ambient and 140 degress track temp. Our temps after 8 laps of pushing pretty hard were 200 engine (stock radiator), 225 oil (thanks MODE Racing!), and 250 tranny (new Mocal heat exchanger rocks, thanks again MODE). I am pretty excited about that, I have never been able to build a racecar with a stock radiator and have it not overheat.
A big problem though... It was hotter inside the car that inside the radiator. After 8 laps the floor temp next to the peddles was 218 degrees! I guess the downpipe and turbo located very close to the fire wall does not help that. On the list of things to do is spend way to much money on gold foil, and build some aluminum stand off heat shields. I have seen drivers get pretty nasty burns from this very problem and don't think we could spend more than 20 minutes in the car right now.
The only thing that we are struggling with right now is weight (imagine that), we really need to take another 200 lbs off of this car. The tires are really not liking turning blazing fast lap times with 3650 lbs on their back. The chassis is not so happy either with such sticky rubber demanding such high g-forces. I am confident though that with Bryan @ JRZ's help, we will get the car tuned well.
Our best time of the day in this nasty heat was 1:50.00 with a LOT left on the table. Here are a couple of pics, so far everyone at the track LOVES the car. This is really the first time it has been exposed to a large audience other than NAGTROC.
