First track experience today ! Some good, some really bad

travisjb

Had some mechanical issues at the track today, so figured I'd share with you guys to see if anyone else is having the same...

location: PIR in phoenix, az
Phoenix International Raceway - Trackpedia
conditions: sunny, 70f
event: nasa hpde3... 4 runs about 20 mins each

I'm driving a 370z base model with sport package and M6... no mods so far, other than pulling about 100 pounds of plastic and spare tires... i only broke it in for ~200 miles prior to the event.

Overall, I think this car is a great starting point for a track / race car. It was reasonably fast, but I definitely wanted more out of 4th gear when going onto the nascar straight... I think once I have another few hundred pounds out of the car, and maybe +25hp in tweaks, the power/weight will be better. The suspension was not as stiff as I'm used to but even with stock setup it handles ok if you anticipate the gradual body roll. I definitely found that it was NOT able to hold the line I wanted for example in the carousel at PIR, but I think that'll be fixed with sticky tires.

So, the big issue i had is this... About 10 mins into my first run, I noticed that the oil temperature gauge was pretty much burried at 300f... As soon as that happened, my rev limiter moved from 7500 to 6000... Every time I'd accelerate through a gear it would prematurely cut the throttle at 6000rpm... Was extremely frustrating as it seemed to cut in at all the wrong times and slowed me down overall by at least 10%

It happened in all four of my runs, usually about 10 mins in.

I can only imagine this is going to get worse as I move to stickier tires and tweak the motor.

It gets worse... After the fourth and final run, it dropped the rev limiter from 6000 to 3500, just as I was pulling off the track. I decided to keep the car running after the session to let the engine cool. Tried to drive it home, and every time I accelerated through a gear it just cut the engine at 3500, sending it back down to 2500... I had to shift gears real fast... luckily 6th gear is good for 80mph at 3000rpm, so I made it home. Also, it turned out that after I shut off the car and restarted, the computer had reset and all was back to normal.

So, we need a solution to this ! I suspect Nissan has decided to get very aggressive on the computer parameters for protecting the engine from overheat in order to lower their warranty repair expenses. We either need to get some REALLY BIG oil coolers for this car, or someone needs to figure out how to hack the computer.

Thoughts ? Anyone else had this issue ?