Last weekend was the first race of the SF region SCCA calendar, and my first race in the 1993 RX7 I bought last year and have been prepping for racing. I have entered it into the American V8 Supercar class of SCCA, which is a class of cars with V8 power and 6:1 weight to power ratio. This is what the car currently has:

– Chevy LS2 block and LS3 heads, 460whp / 420wtq

– Tremec T56 Magnum gearbox, Ford Cobra IRS 8.8″ differential w/3.73 gearing

– JRZ 3-way adjustable dampers, 900lb-in springs front, 700lb-in springs rear

– CCW wheels 18″ x 12″ with Hoosier 305/18 R100 endurance racing tires (spec tire for class)

– Brembo GT 4-piston front brakes, Wilwood 4-piston rear brakes, Cobalt XR1 pads

– 2775lbs w/220lbs driver

We went up to test on Thurs March 21st to shake down the car and tweak the setup. This was also a day where no times would be posted publicly, so we wouldn’t show our whole hand in terms of lap times.

Much of the day was spent messing around with the Race Technology Dash2 and DL1 that came with the car. I had to break out an ancient Thinkpad with WinXP to run the Race Technology software, and it was a pain trying to get the dash configured properly. At one point I had the RPM scale set wrong, and revs were reading 2X higher than they should have been. At the same time the car had a flaky ignition switch and made a loud BANG and the engine cut out, and I thought I had overrevved and blew up the engine. But some reconfiguring of the dash and replacing the ignition switch got everything sorted.

The car felt good in testing, and we were running old rubber that the car came with with ~15 heat cycles on it. The fastest time I set in testing that day was 1:50.2, but I could tell the tires were starting to lose their edge. The car had understeer through turn 3, and oversteer trying to get the power down coming out of turn 5.

Practice/qualifying day came on Friday, and we kept the old tires on the car because we wanted to see what our competition could do before we went to fresh rubber. There were 7 cars entered in the class last weekend, but our main competition was Darrell Anderson, the founder of the class. Darrell runs a 2004 Mustang with a Chevy LS7 engine putting out between 600 and 800whp (depending on who you ask). But its not the power that we’re lacking compared to Darrell (all competitors are supposed to be 6:1 lbs:hp), but rather the downforce. Our splitter is a little piece of alumilite that doesn’t do much, and as a result we have to run the rear wing virtually flat so as not to upset the aero balance of the car. Darrell, on the other hand, has a huge front splitter with dive planes and as a result can crank in lots of rear wing (as you can see in the below picture).

In qualifying, I got a clear lap and ended up setting a 1:51.5. Darrell set a 1:50.5. Connie Bogan was starting third in her Viper Competition Coupe with a 1:54.

Saturday came and the our race was first at 8:30AM. Apparently Darrell had a problem in qualifying that led to his lap time being invalidated, so he would be starting from the back of the 7-car field. So that put me on the pole. In my year and a half of racing Spec Miata, I had never started a race on the pole so this was a new experience, but leading the field around behind the pace car was simple enough.

I got a good start to the race and put myself out of the reach of Connie, and focused on lap time so as to put as much time between myself and Darrell as possible. The track was really slippery so I struggled to get the tires up to temperature. After a few laps Darrell had dispatched the cars between us, and started pressuring me from behind.

On lap 7 I got held up behind a slower Mustang in Turn 12, and Darrell took the opportunity to pass on the inside coming into Turn 14. It was a clean pass and I set about trying to stick with him.

About a lap later, however, a lapped 350Z almost rolled right in front of me in Turn 5. He got spooked by me in his mirrors and braked too late going into the Crow’s Nest. His car went shooting off the backside of the hill and he tried to still make the turn, nearly resulting in a roll. His car then slid back on the track and nearly took me out.

This lost me some time to Darrell, but a new problem was just rearing its head: brake fade. I started losing more and more braking power, and on the 9th lap the brake pedal went all the way to the floor going into turn 14. I couldn’t get the car slowed down enough, and went into the grass between T14 and T15. I came back on track and proceeded more slowly into Turn 1. After a couple laps I learned that the brakes came back if I pumped them on the straights, but I couldn’t maintain the pace I had before. I finished the race in second, 5 seconds behind Darrell who ended up having a fuel pressure issue towards the end of the race.

Before qualifying later in the day, we fitted fresh Hoosier tires as the previous tires were pretty much done. I didn’t get a single clear lap in qualifying, but I could tell the car was faster through the corners. I qualified second with a 1:51.2, and Darrell had the pole with a smoking 1:49.4. SCCA let him keep his time so I suppose he solved whatever compliance problem the car had in first qualifying.

The race started uneventfully, Darrell got a good start and I slotted in behind him into Turn1. The next few laps we were pretty much glued together, and I was a bit surprised that I could keep up with him. He definitely could get on the gas earlier in high speed corners thanks to the aero, but I found I could catch him on the brakes and in the slower sections of the track that are more about mechanical grip than aero grip. He started making little mistakes here and there, and I decided I was going to press him until he made a bigger mistake and I could get a run on him.

After 6 or 7 laps, my braking issues started to rear their head again, and I was having trouble keeping the pedal firm on an entire lap. I was tapping the brakes with my left foot on all the straights to keep the fluid pressure up, but the brakes were getting worse and worse.

Around lap 10 however, a bigger problem cropped up: I started losing power. The engine started missing, then my gauges started conking out. Turns out the alternator seized up sometime during the race, and the car was running on battery alone. The car died, and I coasted into the pits with no power, my race done.

In the race, Darrell set a fast lap of 1:49.7, and my fastest lap was 1:49.8. I feel like we can catch him if we work on the durability of the brakes. We used thermal paint to get an idea of brake temps, and the rears were too hot while the fronts were too cold. Also, the fluid was coming out of the rears was black, so we were boiling fluid back there. We’re going to adjust the balance on the master cylinders and see if that helps.

Next race is April 12-14th at Laguna Seca. Laguna is hard on a car’s brakes (especially when you’re doing 140MPH into turn 2), so we might add some ducting as well.

Videos of the two races are here: