My 2nd session of the day @ MSR (the only one I recorded, the one where I ran off the side, about 11:45 in):

Watched your vid... congrats on the first event! great feeling huh? Looks like a safe track too, which is nice for first time event

You did well for a first time and showed courage... showed good car control a few times when the car got loose... also good awareness of other vehicles... SOAP BOX... agree, you need to get some instruction in your next track event... understand the instructor is going to back you down on speed vs what you did at this event until you master the fundamentals of picking a line, car control, smooth inputs, etc. Don't get frustrated by that like i did! ease in... you've got a thousand things to learn before you will be safe to get at the limit... Also, I like that you had an off due to improper braking force and not rolling out the steering coming out of the turn... line was off, and lots of other things you can learn from that off...

Thanks for the feedback, Travis :)

Searching for an instructed event somewhere around here in the near future now...

you probably know about this - just in case

MotorsportReg.com : Online registration management tools for driving and social events

Nice job. Watching the video I think you did pretty well for your first time out despite the little incident. The track has a ton of runoff which is always a good thing. Actually looks like a pretty demanding track, decreasing radius corners and combinations and particularly difficult to determine the perfect line especially when you've never been there before.

Ditto on Motorsportreg.com, just about every club lists their events on there these days. Audi and BMW both have good instructors available, I would look for their events as your next step.

Great track video. I love watching them and listening to you guys track advice for my day is coming.

Anyone have any ideas for mounting my basic small handheld camera? I can't find a windshield device for it. Any ideas ?

Got signed up for The Driver's Edge @ MSR Houston (same track as the open lapping event I went to), for the weekend of Nov 4-5. Sucks that it's two months out, but really it works best with my schedule, and it's a nice added bonus that it's at the one track I've driven on already (and the closest one, it's about an hour drive from my place).

In the meantime I'm going to keep trying to find time for local SCCA-type events to sharpen up my basic skills and confidence a bit.

Random notes from messing with UpRev Tuner on my car (I left fueling and timing the way the dyno tuner set it up, this is just all the other little stuff):

1) Upping the Idle RPMs smoothed out idling with the AC on a bit. Probably wastes a little more fuel, but meh. It's a map by coolant temp range, and mine is set now between 1000 at the cold end and 775 at the hot end (whereas before it was something like 8xx down to 650).

2) The "ETC Off" under options is interesting. It completely disables the ECU's electronic throttle control, reverting to always having a linear relationship between the gas pedal and the throttle plates. Throttle response is awesome with it disabled, and low RPM acceleration feels more natural on the gas pedal. The downside is this doesn't allow the ECU to interfere with the throttle much at all, including SRM. And since with the 7AT you can't really blip on your own (it's never truly in neutral), this pretty much kills rev matching on downshifts, making them all jerky/shocky.

3) The throttle maps (which only work with ETC On obviously) are the "right" way to tune the throttle response without disabling SRM and other ECU interventions. Luckily they're per-UpRev-map, so you can try out different throttle maps on e.g. maps 1, 2, 3 with all the other settings the same to get a feel for how it works.

Wide open seems to be the value "3800", and it seems to need to go negative at low pedal position + high RPMs. Setting it to a nice linear ramp from the stock 1.3% pedal position numbers to 3800's around 95% throttle is much better than stock. Still not quite perfect though. I wish I could find settings that felt as good as "ETC Off" for normal accel / upshift at all ranges.

4) The torque map (for 7AT people only) is how you effectively adjust transmission line pressure and shifting speed. Basically the ECU needs an internal estimate of your engine's torque across different RPM ranges and fueling inputs (effectively, gas pedal position) in order to use the "correct" line pressure and shift speed for a smooth quick shift.

If you've done a lot of modding, the factory torque estimates are way off (and really, even on the stock car, the factory estimates are a little low, which contributes to low RPM downshifts being sounding so violent, and the little jerks when it auto-downshifts to 2 and 1 while coming to a stop).

Secret Services had already bumped my torque map values all up by about 10%. I found that bumping those values by a further 20% has worked out great so far. Shifts are both smoother and faster. Keep in mind I'm out at the limit of N/A bolt-on power mods, so values this high may not work as smoothly for a milder setup (e.g. just catback and K&N dropins or whatever). I may try going even higher, but I want to drive around on these values for several days first and make sure I don't spot any quirks under various conditions.

wstar, I'm going to try my hand at Red meat & race fuel coming up Thursday (Sep 8th), and let you know. I do have the GTM HD Oil cooler in front, and GTM rear diff cooler (although I don't plan on going nuts) I'll let you know how it goes. :)

Ah just found this post, saw your other in the Houston Area Meet thread though. I'll be there tomorrow :)

had fun wstar, at MSR Houston Today. Sorry I had to leave so soon, I had a funky feeling about the electrics with the newly installed diff controller, it kept shutting off, I was afraid of a bad wire or ground. Turned out the problem was my in ability to see the shitty green LED through white "translucent rubber" in direct sunlight. All was good. Thanks again for coming to help a Z brother out.

Yeah it was a fun day :)

I scrapped that data/video from the first run, since it was kinda short and half of it was following the tow vehicle around :p

I kept the data/vid from aLapRecorder HD on my last run of the day, and I'm processing it in RaceRender 2 now. The only windows machine I have on hand here is tiny little Dell Mini 1018 netbook that I use for UpRev. Says it's going to take ~5 hrs to encode the 13 minute output video in high def :eek: Anyways, maybe later this evening or tomorrow I'll finally have something encoded and youtube'd and we'll see how this cheap-*** data logging solution worked out.

Cost breakdown on the data logging setup:

Existing Android Phone (T-Mobile/LG G2X, has 2x 1Ghz CPU + high def camera): free
Existing cheapo windows laptop (Dell Mini 1018): free
Qstarz QT-818XT bluetooth 5hz DGPS: $70
PLX Kiwi bluetooth OBD-II: $90
aLapRecorder HD (Android App): $6.50
RaceRender 2 Deluxe (Windows App): $25

So we're looking at just shy of $200. If it works even half as well as a "real" racing data logger solution and is useful to learn from, it's a steal :)

Also, I had two fuel cuts on my last run of the day, around 2/3 of a tank this time. Both were exiting the same fast right corner onto a straight, in the exact same spot on the track as last time. Seems like an ECU limiter kicks in temporarily at 6K RPM. I'm guessing the ECU sees the loss of fuel pressure/volume/something and sets up that temporary limit automatically to protect itself or something.

New Video. I'll re-paste the summary info from Youtube below, for embedded watchers:

MSR Houston Clockwise again in my 370Z at the Red Meet and Race Fuel event on Sep 8th. This is my second time on the track, so obviously my driving isn't great :).

Experimenting with a new cheapo setup for telemetry, etc ahead of my upcoming The Driver's Edge class: "aLapRecorder HD" recorded the video, OBDII data, and GPS data on my dash-mounted Android phone (T-mobile G2X running Cyanogen firmware). OBDII hardware was a PLX Kiwi bluetooth, and GPS hardware was a Qstarz QT-818XT in 5Hz DGPS mode. Post-processing was done with RaceRender 2 Deluxe.

The phone's accelerometers (combined with the unstable window mount) seem to provide fairly useless G-force data, but the rest of the data came out pretty decent. Data to video sync is very slightly off, but not enough that I'm going to go back and re-encode this whole video. Audio is noisy as always from a dash-mounted cellphone with the windows open.

Also the "Throttle" display isn't logging pedal position. It's logging some parameter related to the ECU-controlled throttle butterflies, not my pedal position. I'm hoping it may prove comparatively enlightening down the road if I play with the throttle mappings more in UpRev before the next run.

Got what I think is fuel starvation, this time at 2/3 tank, twice this session at the same spot on the track (Laps 4 + 6) where it happened last time (beginning of the long back straight, coming out of a long fast right corner).

Lap 5 was the fastest one, a pretty decent run for me overall.

watched the vid... def an improvement over last time... bumpy track is actually a decent course to learn on because it will favor smooth treatment of driver inputs... you were clearly overbraking it certain cases - even looked like you were braking coming out of turns to set up for the next one when you prob didn't need to be on the brakes... once you get the lines right - and you get a feel for how weight balance impacts your traction - you'll be amazed how much speed you can carry into a corner and eventually get set up properly for sequenced turns at higher speeds throughout