Sunday 21 August 2011

First Track day 30th July

Well I finally made it to a track day. GD Organised through Javelin track days. 2.5 hours to get there but what a hoot!
Emptied the boot, Quite surprised how much crap we managed to take and fit in there!!
We had a good safe briefing, then a few sighting laps to get the idea of the track. Then we went out and had some fun.
I spun a couple of times, well 3 to be honest, the 3rd corner was a real tight hairpin and caught a few people out. the other 2 were just me pushing my limits past my luck! :P
I managed to catch the 2 spins on camera.We did have a bit of a rig that we built to hold my camcorder at the angle I wanted to capture to include the front lines, dash, track ahead and hopefully look nice, only cos the marshals and organisers wouldn't allow cameras on a (non fixed mount), i.e. suction cups, adhesive pads or clamps. It had to be hard mounted! So my work buddy built a monstrosity that wasn't going anywhere and they had no excuse not to let it go out! I had to capture my first track day on camera! Needless to say we got ripped about it by others and it was quite funny to see Andy's face when he saw it.

Few laps n spins Video

A little shaky as I later found out that image stabilization isn't good for high frequency vibrations! Hay ho, Not brilliant but I'm happy with the sound I caught!

I had one minor issue during the day, and that was the adjuster knobs on the rear shocks have a grub screw holding them on. one grub screw was gone and the other was loose. so I want able to precisely adjust the shocks as it was still soft for the run in period. Luckily I bought a scissor jack the day before! I took the wheels off and managed to find a rough setting using a screw driver in the slot. After a few goes at refitting the wheels, lowering, doing a bounce test and jacking up taking the wheels off, bit more tweaking...... took about an hour and half. so lost a bit of fiddling time with the camera.

On the way home we detoured to fit a Tunnel run in to end the day with.

Had a cracking drive back too. plenty of pleasant drivers, one truck had a play in the road works on the M25, egging me to blip the throttle, him with his fog horns.... a right giggle!

As you can see, these sort of track days have plenty of room to fall off, and not much traffic to work around! I would recommend it to everyone.