Had an awesome weekend at MSR-Houston, lots of fun. They bumped me to Yellow because they knew I had been edging up into that range off and on for a while now, and it had a shorter waitlist. I was a little nervous about jumping into Yellow the first morning, but once I got out there it went great and I was able to keep pace and manage traffic there just fine. It's really great group to run with
JRZ RS1 Coilovers: Keep in mind I was coming from stock, but OMFG these made such a huge difference to the car's handling. Even after having played with them a little on the street, I wasn't expecting such a huge improvement on the track as what I ended up feeling. In an effort to be conservative I started out at half-stiff in the rear and about 2/3rd's stiff in the front and figured I'd adjust from there if things seemed screwy. It felt so good in the first session I decided to avoid the adjuster knob tweaking all weekend. I had a learning curve adapting to the car's new handling anyways, no point making it harder on myself.
Multiple other drivers that managed to follow me through a corner commented to me out of the blue about how my car was dead flat in corners, virtually zero body roll. Brake->Accel transitions were much easier and smoother, to the point where I started getting comfortable with small amounts of trail braking. No issues with loss of traction due to suspension hop or anything, even though MSR-H has lots of little ripples and bumps in the pavement here and there.
The biggest change though was how much easier it was to control the rear with throttle in the corners. It's like before I had to push through throttle while slowly compressing down the stock rear suspension, and then it would finally break hard and it would be difficult to control. Now it breaks free with less throttle in a very smooth, predictable manner. It was very confidence inspiring and I did a lot of drifty corner exits on them this weekend. I love these coilovers! Maybe next time out I'll start adjusting stiffness to find my optimal settings, but at any setting they just rock
New Failure Mode - Dead Thermostat: Saturday in the later sessions I was noticing a signs of coolant splash in the engine bay (i.e. from the pressure relief cap spewing a bit). My oil temps were a bit high, peaking around 265 but never really pushing any higher once they got there. After the final session I looked harder at things and it was apparent I had lost more coolant than I thought and needed to investigate. In the end, it turns out my thermostat had managed to stop working right. It wasn't opening, or at least wasn't opening fully enough to matter. I had the track shop take the thermostat out of the car so I could keep running Sunday. With the thermo gone the coolant stopped boiling over, oil temps were still peaking around 255, but kinda understandable: no thermostat probably isn't very efficient with the high-speed radiator flow. I really think the oil cooler saved me from engine damage on the first day when it was stuck, otherwise things would've overheated much faster.
Videos:
I youtube'd two laps from the 2nd Yellow session on Sunday. The first is my personal best time at 1:52.11, and the second is a few laps later when I ran off in the grass. As I mentioned in the Youtube descriptions: most of my really "good" laps this weekend were in the 1:53's and 1:54's. I was overdriving myself and the tires a bit this session (and not in a smooth way), which led to both the awesome fast-lap and the eventual off. At least it was a clean off, I straightened up before I hit the grass.