Open
me in a new window for the corner names.
I'm not entirely sure, but I think Bob has been sweating. He flips a DVD of his fastest lap onto the pit counter as he downs a pint of Alka-Seltzer after his latest session. He has been desperately trying to make Trial Mountain's bumpy circuit and the BMW's chassis kiss and make up, without much success.
The Trial Mountain BMW dealership mechanics just shrug. "It's a ragtop, what do you expect if you whack in over four hundred horsepower?" Bob has run the gamut with these guys, fitting stiff springs, soft, springs, varying damper settings, winding in toe in and out (at both ends) and he's still not happy. To be honest, they're a little annoyed too, they've installed
and removed the M-sport LSD three times now. Bob asked them what the point was if it didn't make the car go faster, which upset them and the chief engineer had a bit of a fit. Bob told them where they could fit it and went back on the track.
T1: 16.234
Bob says that to make his fastest time, he has to take the kerbs through 'Pete's Landing'. Steering around everything just didn't seem to work for him. He thinks that maybe actually using the road is a faster way, but to do it, he would have to run the Z very stiff, and perhaps with lots of LSD, and he didn't want to do that. He mutters about traction, compliance, weight transfer and LSD-lock-up-induced oversteer. I can see from his DVD that when running with the LSD, taking "The Ballroom" before the T1 split is a very scary affair, and full throttle spits the tail out with a fair degree of regularity. With the open diff, the car mostly just squats and goes. Bob nods and says the car is now very soft, but it mostly grips okay like that. There is a little waffle about bound/rebound ratios but he's clearly bored with it all.
T2: 44.956
Watching Bob's run up the hill and into the long straight is interesting. He takes a wide line into "IMOA's Chute" after T1, and clearly just plants the throttle all the way up through the "Stress S" with minor corrections to make the car point the right way. Bob shrugs. Again, into "'Cuda Bend" the car is dragged down from speed mostly in a straight line, then a little turn in on the brakes before planting the throttle with as little lock as possible. Bob says no under- or oversteer is acceptable here. His faster lap has a little lift in the middle of this corner to which Bob shrugs again and states that if it isn't going in the right direction using what's in your hands, you've only got your feet left.
T3: 1:06.399
Bob shrugs again when the next section is played out. He seems to run very conservatively through here, well clear of the tunnel entry wall on the right, even through he's clearly taken a line to clip the apex, over the yellow hatching of "Carpark". He mumbles something about rocks and I leave it at that.
After the third tunnel, going through "Bridge" in fifth, Bob taps the brakes to get the speed down a little to plant the throttle for the rest of the lap. However, as he does so, the car has a big moment, caught with a sharp flick. Bob isn't yet tired of shrugging and says it's the best he can do. The car, he says, no matter how it is set up, will alway try to spit you off somewhere.
Bob hands the keys back. He doesn't want to play anymore.
V.
👍
. I did figure out the 'secret' to this weeks race and its the same as the one from the Jaguar XJR a Apricot Hill about a year ago 
Will have some clean splits posted later hopefully, have seen a couple :15.9x's and 1:05.flat tho.
But I'll see ya at his new place tho.
Anyway, here is a quick run down of what I've done so far...
