The Hothatch Diaries

Saturday morning, the 24th of November, 6:38 AM. My alarm clock would not go off for another hour but I was awake nonetheless. And having had a rather short night, I really needed that extra hour. So I tried my best to fall asleep again and succeeded at least a little bit. About an hour and a half later, after two large espressos, I was ready for the day – a rather iffy day as far as the weather was concerned, I might add. The night before, sleet was in the forecast, and it looked as if it could happen. But for now it was dry and even the sun was showing – somewhat. There was a large dark cloud bank looming from the south. I was headed south-east, though, to the Spreewaldring Training Center (STC) for my first track day. I arrived there 20 minutes early after a 45-minute-drive. I took the time to grab some breakfast from a nearby supermarket. When I came back, all the attendees had arrived. Our “group” consisted of the instructor, me and one other attendee in a Mazda MX-5, who had brought his 14-year-old son along. Yep, that was it. There was actually a third participant expected, but he didn’t show up until midday just to get an idea of what he had missed – which was a lot of fun basically.

After the mandatory paperwork had been done, we got a brief introduction to the track, flag rules, correct seating position and Kamm’s circle. Then we hit the track (see picture). The instructor, a young guy named David, with some racing experience (Karts and Formula Ford is what I remember from the top of my head), lead us two in a Dacia Logan Cup car for some laps around the short handling configuration (green) to show us the line. Later he jumped into our cars and commented a little on hour hand position on the wheel, turn in points, where to hit the apex etc. We repeated that on the faster configuration (blue), before we did the same again on the full course (red, of course).

When we started out, the track was still wet in most parts and damp in others, air temperature must have been around 3-5°C – perfect conditions for a first track day, I’d say. Because of the varying track conditions, you always had to be on your toes even at relatively low speeds. We didn’t have any more rain during the day, let alone sleet, and the track started to dry off more, which made faster corner speeds possible and I could hit the throttle a little earlier without suffering from understeer too much.

The Clio behaved well. The winter tyres felt pretty soft of course, and they did let me know that by squealing quite a bit at times. After five relatively hard driven laps, I even felt that they had exceeded their optimal temperature and they started to rub rather than squeal in the last turn. But given the conditions, I doubt that summer tyres would have been any better, probably worse. Feedback through the wheel was quite alright. I always knew what was going on and could react accordingly.

When we were on the full course and David instructed from the passenger seat, he didn’t talk much. He even said, he felt a little useless, as I pretty much had the racing line down by that time. I knew where to turn in, where to hit the apex and where to start unwinding the steering wheel and when to hit the throttle. That didn’t work perfectly all the time, though. But when it didn’t, I knew it and I knew what I did wrong. Since I don’t have any real life racing experience, I can only attribute my “feel” for the racing line to my virtual racing experience with Live For Speed.

Where David did give me some advice was with gear selection, though. I took some of the turns in second at first, because peak power and torque is rather late on the Clio, and I felt I was too slow for third. I was, but it turned out that third gear worked out better, nonetheless. I could drive more relaxed not having to shift up mid corner or almost hitting the rev limiter before feeling comfortable to shift up. Also, picking the higher gear reduced understeer considerably, of course. So despite the lack of power, I don’t think third gear was any slower than second, maybe even a tad faster. And I was definitely smoother. So, overall I was pretty pleased with the day, the instructor and with myself, I have to say. Of course, we were still taking it easy, but the goal was not to beat the track record anyway – and it never will be.

I did time two laps with my mobile phone and the GPS Lap Timing software (see previous post) towards the end of the training when we had around 45 minutes of free driving. I hadn’t paid for the software, so timing was limited to five minutes per turn, but overall it worked. Kind of. I got one lap of 2:06.000 and one of 2:03.000. It is of course highly unlikely that these times are accurate to the s/100, but I think I have figured out what I did wrong. There is a setting in my GPS receiver utility where I can define the time output. I had set that to UTC only and didn’t check the box that said “milli-seconds”. So that would explain it, I guess, but I need to test it with the new settings to be sure.

Well, this is it for now. I’m planning my next track day on the weekend of the 8th of December. Whether I’ll actually go will depend on the weather, though. Meanwhile, here are two of my laps from the first outing. This was towards the end of the day and you can clearly see, how cautious I still was. It did feel faster than it looks, though:

It is a little ridiculous, but: Even though I have not turned a single lap, yet, I’m already thinking about lap timing. Don’t get me wrong, this is not about sheer speed as such. I don’t want to know my times to brag about them, but to keep track of my progress. So the goal is not to get fast, but to get faster with time, to develop my driving skills and to see how fast they’re developing. Of course, this will not be very important in the beginning. My first track day will likely be under less than perfect conditions. It will be cold, I will be running winter tyres and the way the weather is at the moment, there is a high chance of it being wet. But there will be progress nonetheless. I’ll be slow on my very first lap and (hopefully) less slow at the end of the day. And having an objective measurement will increase fun. Which is what it’s all about.

So what timing solutions are there? I browsed the internet quite a bit in the last days and quickly realised that there are plenty. But most of them are not an option. They’re either too complicated or too expensive. There’s the well known PerformanceBox for example, which seems like an easy to use pretty accurate tool with tons of features. But it’s way too expensive for me. There are 2D datarecording systems which are also way too expensive and more for the professional user. There’s AIM with the Mychron Light as it’s cheapest solution, which is not that expensive, but still too expensive for what it provides. Also, you need at least one infrared lap timing beacon set up at the track, which makes it a little complicated. I’m sure there are plenty of other products available, either GPS based or working with an infrared transmitter or even with an inductive loop, which the STC doesn’t have.

What I found to be the best solution for my needs and my budget is actually a little programme for my mobile phone. It took me quite some time to find it. The first one I stumbled across was the RaceChrono software, apparently developed by some finnish Carfreaks (they have a very stylish blog, which can now be found in my link list by the way). This seemed to offer all I needed, but unfortunately it doesn’t work on my Nokia 6300 because it has the wrong operating system. But luckily I found a very similar programme that’s Java based. It goes by the telling name of GPS Lap Timing and is available for my mobile. It installed with no problems and seems to be working fine. I’ll spare the details of how it works and what it can do (for further information you might want to check out the developers website), but all I need for it to work is a bluetooth GPS receiver and I’m set. Of course this will not be as accurate as many other solutions, but it will only cost around 60 to 120 Euro depending on the GPS receiver. The full programme is only 9.99€, so that’s all you have to pay if you already have a GPS mouse. And it should be plenty for my current needs – if it works properly, that is. Due to lack of a GPS receiver, I couldn’t test it, yet. So more on that topic will follow as soon as I found a proper GPS mouse.

No, there’s not going to be an inboard video of me doing a lap around the STC just yet (not very surprising really, as I haven’t even done a lap). But a little over a week ago I ordered a suction mount for my digi cam. It arrived last tuesday and I have since done a little bit of testing on my way to work. To be honest, neither the mount nor the camera are perfect solutions for high-quality inboard footage. Which is not really surprising. The mount was only 15 Euro after all and, as to be expected in that price range, it’s pretty flimsy and shakes and vibrates quite a bit on bumpy roads.

The fact that my camera, a simple Sony DSC-W55, doesn’t have a stabiliser, is not of much help either. But it’s a still- and not a video-camera, so the lack of a stabiliser is certainly excusable. And (at least after initial testing) the vibration does not seem to be nearly as bad as I would have expected when I first saw the camera shake on it’s little mount on the windscreen. In fact, what’s more annoying than the shaking, is the noise it makes while doing that. Being so close to the camera’s microphone, it’s pretty dominant, and I will probably sooner or later have to find a way to modify the mount to minimize that. But we’ll see how it works on the race track.

I wish the track day wasn’t still two weeks away. At the least, that is, because if attendance is as low as it was for my first try, they’ll probably cancel it again. If that happens, I might just go out there anyway and do my first laps without an instructor.

On a completely different note, I had my winter tyres put on today and noticed along the way that my rear brake pads will need replacement soon. And one of my summer tyres had a brad of some sort in it, a pretty long piece of metal. Funny thing is, it’s pretty much on the shoulder of the tyre and I have no idea how it got there (and why I didn’t lose any air apparantly). Since it’s a V-Tyre (Goodyear Eagle F1 GS-D3) it can’t be repaired. The bad news is, the tyres are almost new. And the good news is, the tyres are almost new. Seriously. On the one hand, I wasn’t really prepared to spend money on them that soon again. And on the other hand, I’ll only have to get one new tyre. Still annoying, though.

Not that I didn’t expect this, but now that it’s confirmed, I am indeed a little disappointed. The Track Day on November 10th was cancelled. Not because of the weather (the 10-day-forecast predicted sleet), but because of low attendance. In fact, I would have been the only attendant. So it’s hard to blame them for that decision. Next Track Day is planned for November 24th, and I’m hoping it takes place.

In the meantime, I’ll just tell a little more about the track I’ll spend most of my time on. The location is called Spreewaldring Training Center (STC) and is located just 70 kilometers south of Berlin. It’s a privately owned track which was opened up in July by two guys who just felt it was a good idea (gotta like that attitude). One of them, Reinhard Budde, is also running the kart track right across the street from the STC and the other, Manfred Werker, is a former TV and Radio technician. Erm, well, I might add that he also has several years of experience in motorsports. He races a BMW M3GT (E36) in the BF Goodrich Endurance Championship Nürburgring (VLN) and managed to come 3rd in the 2001 championship. In 2002 he and his team mates won the 24 Hours of Nürburgring in their class, which is quite an achievement.

The track itself is rather twisty and with 2.7 Kilometers not overly long. It’s described as pretty challenging but not very fast. Apparantly I haven’t driven it yet, but I don’t expect to hit speeds any higher than maybe 160-170 km/h. I might be totally wrong here, but we’ll see. Unfortunately, the satellite pictures of google earth are not up-to-date enough, so I can’t show a proper aerial right now, but the picture above should give a good enough idea of the track layout. For inboard footage you might want to check out youtube. There are several videos of an Opel Speedster and some others that give an idea of what the track is like to drive. It’s not made for actual races and will never be FIA approved. The idea simply is to give the casual “racer”, clubs or small private racing teams an opportunity to race and have some fun without breaking traffic rules. I believe it will do that just fine.

I went to the garage today to get a first diagnosis for the strange noise coming from the suspension. As I wrote earlier, I had high hopes about that workshop, because they fixed up a Clio Sport Team some time ago, but I’m a little disappointed, I must say. It didn’t seem like the mechanic had any special knowledge about Sport-Clios. When I asked him about the Clio Team, he said he remembered it, but I had the impression that he didn’t actually work on it. Maybe he wasn’t with the shop back then, who knows. He was rather nice, though, and tried hard to find the cause of that noise. Which isn’t worth much, since he didn’t succeed. So the only thing I can do is to keep driving and wait till the noise becomes more prominent. I decided to go to the track day on Nov. 10th anyway. If it can’t be identified, it can’t be that bad, I reckon. And the track day might even speed things up a little.

I also ordered the Pirelli Winter Snowsport Tyres today, but I won’t have them put on until after the track day. The earliest possibility would have been two days prior to it, which would not have given me enough time to break them in. So I’ll run my Summer Tyres. They should be fine if it stays dry, and I’ll just drive them hard to keep up the temperatures. I just hope that great plan is not ruined by rain.