The Hothatch Diaries

Yes, I did have the firm intention not to track my car on winter tyres anymore. And no, I didn’t stick to that intention. Having the newly fitted brakes bedded-in and having built a new camera mount, I just couldn’t resist. I needed to test these things, didn’t I? Especially since the weather was perfect again. I did however manage to confine my testing to one 15-minute turn only. Which was enough for a first evaluation of the brakes and plenty for testing the camera mount.

First the brakes: Initially, the new setup doesn’t seem to have any more bite than the standard brakes. They just might deliver a little more stopping power, though, which is really hard to tell, if you can’t drive both setups back-to-back. I do believe, however, that they in fact deal with heat better. As opposed to the standard brakes, I could brake just as hard and late at the end of the 15 minutes as I could on the first quick lap. Something that I wasn’t capable of doing consistently before. So, that is good news, but more experience is needed for a final judgement. And there’s always the unknown factor of brake fluid. I changed to brand new ATE Super Blue Racing and don’t know where the boiling point of the old fluid was, so that in itself might account for better stability. And there’s of course some psychology involved. You can never really trust yourself on these things, I suppose – If you want to believe that your brakes are better, you’re likely to feel that. But I’ll just disregard that factor and pretend I’m objective.

Second the new camera mount: As I wrote earlier, I wasn’t at all satisfied with the flimsy suction mount on the wind screen I had. So I made a more sturdy mount for the headrest. Mainly in order to be able to see my steering inputs and my shifting. As you can see on the picture, it’s a pretty simple design, which is more or less based on the CruiseCam or the mount available through Hague in the UK. All the parts I used can be obtained in a do-it-yourself store and assembly is pretty straight forward and self-explanatory, I’d say, so I think there’s no need for a step-by-step guide. (If anybody thinks otherwise, just drop me a line and I’ll consider it.) Here’s a video of two laps shot with the new mount. Much better, I think – despite the fact that the camera used is still the little Sony DSC-W55. I’d say it’s sufficient for my needs:

Get the Flash Player to see this player.

Third my performance: Much better, I’m pleased to report. I was a lot more disciplined than last time and did a better job of concentrating and making small mental notes whenever I suffered from understeer on turn-in (still my main problem) or screwed up slightly in any other respect. The hardest two turns for me, regarding turn-in understeer, are the “Teich-Kurve”, the “Kiwi-Kurve” and less severe the “Süd-Kurve”. I really worked on those and while I didn’t get them right all the time, I did make progress. I discovered that a little bit of trail braking is really helpful here, as to keep more weight on the front and thus improving traction. I’m not all that good at it, yet, but I’m planning to work on it more in the future.

As far as actual lap times go, I’m still not consistent and certainly not getting faster lap by lap, but this time I attribute it to the tyres more than to my driving. After two quick laps, they’re getting rather vague on feedback, which is to be expected with winter rubber and a temperature of around 14-15°C, I suppose. I can only counter that to a certain extent, as it is not really predictable for me, and I constantly need to make adjustments to my driving. GPS Lap Timing looks rather reliable this time. I had proper satellite contact all throughout the turn, and the best time it shows is a decent 1:51.081 (give or take a few tenths, I’d say) on the second timed lap, which was also the lap that felt the best. In case you don’t remember: that is almost two seconds faster than last time. Although some of it will simply come from the fact that I used second gear in one of the turns where I used third before.

I’m rather pleased. And I promise that this was my last track appearance on winter rubber (in fact, I’m calling my tyre supplier tomorrow to make an appointment for swapping).

As mentioned earlier, my brakes had been in need for replacement for quite some time now. But me, being rather useless at technical things, I wasn’t prepared to do that myself. Luckily, a guy I know from a German Clio Forum, who is quite experienced with Clios and a qualified Renault mechanic, was willing to help me with that. I actually mentioned him before. He rebuilt a Clio Team with one of his mates (also a qualified Renault mechanic). So, today we finally got it done. It was a casual two hour job and there’s actually not much to report, besides that it all went well. As you can see from the pictures, my brake discs were quite corroded and rather well used. The rear pads had probably around two millimeters of material left on them. And while the fronts were not worn too badly, they were pretty glazed. Probably mainly from track day use. They did smell rather burned the last time I was at the STC, too.

I went for standard discs and pads on the rear as there’s really not much braking done on the rear axle. And the discs have the advantage of coming fully assembled with wheel bearing and ABS-ring. So that makes replacing them a lot more hassle free. On the front I opted for ATE PowerDiscs and Ferodo DS2500 pads. As of yet, I’m not sure if the combo will work out in the long run, as the PowerDiscs should not be much different to standard discs, except that they’re grooved. The pads on the other hand are a little more track day oriented and should be more aggressive than standards. So there’s the concern of them generating more heat. And while they’re supposedly designed to have a higher optimal working temperature, it remains to be seen if that will have a negative effect on the discs. I’ll probably find out at the next track day, which should be sometime in march.

It was one of those weekends where, still early in the year, you get a hint of Spring. Temperatures were up to above 10° Celsius and the sun was giving all it had to make sitting outside in a Café halfway enjoyable. I wasn’t going to sit in the sun, though, and headed for the Spreewaldring on Sunday early in the afternoon.

Before you actually get to the track, which is just a couple of miles off the Autobahn, you have to turn left onto a small country road. It leads through a small grove and shortly afterwards the entrance to the STC is to the right. But once on the road you can already see part of the track from the distance. This time, for the first time, I could actually see the sun reflecting off a car turning laps on the ring. Oh joy! I wasn’t going to feel totally deserted this time. And there was indeed some action there. Not much, but there was a group of bikers parked on the parking lot along with a few cars and some people were on the earth wall to the south of the track watching the action. By the time I got to the pit lane, two guys on Supermotos, apparantly on slicks, were about to set off for their turn. They weren’t as exciting to watch as I had hoped, but decent fun, nonetheless.

I was next. A guy in a Nissan 200SX was to go behind me. The Nissan had around 220 hp, as I later found out when chatting with him and his buddy who had a Toyota Celica. But as this was his first (or second?) time on the STC, he didn’t catch up to me and I had a clear track throughout the whole turn.

So, time to hone my driving skills without having to worry about being caught up? Theoretically, yes, but in practice not so much. Instead of slowly building up speed lap by lap, concentrating on finding the correct braking points, the best speed for turn-in, the right exit speed and being consistent in all of that, I just found myself blasting around the course. Not that I made any major mistakes, I didn’t once get in trouble or missed a braking point or an apex by miles or anything to that extent. But I constantly found myself going into a turn slightly too hot, understeering with squealing or even rubbing tyres or unwinding the steering wheel too late on corner exit. Stuff like that. And while timing is not to be trusted this time (analyzing the data later showed that I didn’t have a decent GPS signal for a large part of the run), it still seems to show that my lap times didn’t improve throughout the run. The best of 1:52.8 (half a second faster than last time) was on lap 1, but it can be disregarded. I timed the video I took in the evening and it seems to be more in the range of a middle to a high 1:53. The second lap seems to be in the 1:52.9 range, though, and one later lap might be in the same area. Inbetween I have two 1:54s. So even if I was faster than last time, it’s definitely nothing to be proud of. Here’s a video of the first two timed laps (which, if nothing else, definitely makes a point for getting a different camera and mount).

After a little bit of chatting to the Celica and the 200SX and watching a nice Porsche 911 G-model turn some laps, I took my second run. It wasn’t much better. I made a half-arsed attempt at being smoother this time, but soon didn’t concentrate on it anymore. Missing second gear and ending up in neutral in the hairpin after the back straight is testament to that. I don’t have any lap times from the second run due to user error (forgot to push the button). However, from timing the video I can guess that the fastest lap might have been another high 1:52 or a low 1:53. Inconsistency was predominant, though. That was it for the day and I drove off into the sunset.

Despite a slight discontent with my performance I still had lots of fun, of course. And sometimes you learn more from making mistakes than from doing everything right, I suppose. So what I take along from this track day is this: Next time I’ll make a plan of what I want to work on specifically and I need more discipline to actually stick to that plan, which I hope to achieve in turn by actually making that plan. Writing it down to really set my mind on it might be a good idea.

In the meantime, here’s something else I took along from the day: battle scars from nudging the tyre stack in the chicane before the long right-hander leading onto the back straight.