TR6

Just guessing, but I wonder how much was wind resistance down the front straight coupled with the warmer air temp later in the day. I think the wind really picked up later in the day. In my spec miata, I saw almost 10 mph less on Sunday at the end of the front straight than the last time I was at TWS. Some of that for me was warmer air temp compared to december, but I think a lot of it was wind resistance. Of course, my miata makes a little less power than the spec box...

onefastviking

Group 7 race 4
http://www.mylaps.com/results/showrun.jsp?id=1252598

AND, that was in August !

onefastviking

Aren't you sucking thru a smaller straw now also ? Surely that is part of the 10mph.

TRT41

That was sweet. I wish I had a video of it, but just did not want to mess with the camera after all the other stuff I had to deal with.

Gasser

Does my light weight 3.6l car count? 1:50.24

onefastviking

Depends HOW light weight ?

TR6

Good point. I had to switch to a smaller restrictor plate for NASA's 2011 rules. Haven't dynoed yet to find out how bad it hurt me, but no doubt it has dropped my power.

Greg Smith

You too Dave.

I'm not sure I believe that, look at Watkins' qualifying on Saturday, he did his fastest lap(1:57.958) on his 5th lap(with lap times falling). Gladwill did his fastest lap on his first lap which was a 1:57.680, so .3 seconds faster.

I do believe the tires are their fastest on the first couple of laps, but I don't think they fall of 2-4 seconds. Perhaps Watkins or Gladwill can chime in, I think they're both on these forums?

jgladwill

Yes you are correct the tires do not fall off that bad. I was running tires I raced the whole weekend in Sebring on and they were junk by the second sprint race, my car was extremely loose and a handful to drive, Steve would have put down much faster laps had I not been in front of him but I was reaping the benifits of a good start and going just fast enough to win. On sunday I put a fresher set of tires on and ran much quicker in qualifying and both sprint races. The r888 is a very temperature sensitive tire and does slow down when the track temps are higher though. Also the reason my fastest qualifying lap was lap one is because I caught traffic by the second lap, Steve went out later in the session and waited for a clean lap to run a flier, he will usually also run the fastest in his first few laps on these tires.


jgladwill

Coco_951

Well my list of issues gets a big lengthy but the highlights were throttle cable coming undone Thursday and then I spent Practice 1 and 2 spraying coolant on my tires from a hose leak (the leak only happened at temperature) and wondering why the track seemed so slick (sorry guys). I’ve been a little disappointed in the car with a lack of power. At Sebring most other C3 cars pulled me several car lengths down each straight. When you have lemons I tend to make lemonade and I was planning a charge on NASA GTS4 for this year and look at an engine rebuild down the road. Well the power kept decreasing as the weekend was moving on especially at high rpm. We actually took advantage of the dyno there and the car pulled about 294 hp up to 5400 rpm then fell flat on its face to redline. We contemplated all kinds of culprits from fuel filters to ECU mapping. First sprint Saturday it kept getting worse and worse and actually at the end of the race I was only reaching 109mph on the end of the straight and I got through turns 1 and 2 with a lift only, Miata style. Then we had the light bulb moment and decided to remove the exhaust and as suspected the cats were melted and out of the pipes fell the insides of your charcoaler. The 2nd sprint race I could almost hear the angels singing from above everything was so good until about lap 7 came along and I developed a very nasty rear end vibration that vanished when coasting so I limped through the end of that race too knowing something was about to cut loose in the tranny. I give credit to the boys at Topp Racing, they never gave up on it till the end. I’ll get it sorted out – a cup car is like sex, even when its bad it’s still pretty fun!
Also it was bitter sweet to see my old ride sitting in the garages while I’m struggling as the RSA has been bulletproof. It’s like dumping your old girlfriend and having to watch some other guy boning her. Even if you moved on to a prettier gal it’s still a hard pill to swallow. Jim, you’re a lucky man – hope you had a great weekend in her.

jrgordonsenior

Almost beat that ST2 Corvette in front of him....

Veloce Raptor

Wow, Corey, sorry to hear. Love your analogies!

Veloce Raptor

You see John's comments above. Considering qual was in the cool cloudy, relatively unwindy morning & the races in the hot sunny windy afternoon, going from mid to high 57's to 2 flats is not unexpected, and seems to gel with what John's observations are.

Gasser

2677

Gasser

Yes Cory, it was an obvious change as that second sprint, my video showed you just blasting off and never looked back. Nice race. I kept up as long as I could. I think that was 3 to 4 laps...