I approve of your spending priorities.

Seriously though, you should never regret spending money on track days. Means not hard parker.

 

 

Its been a weird balance this year. I needed the car derivable for MRLS or I was going to loose momentum and part-out. The hardware on the car is 90% of where I want it to be in the end and I'm super stoked about that, but I rushed to the finish and I've neglected certain things and they need to be sorted out.

To me, these 3 things breed confidence

1. safety
2. reliability
3. skill

in that order.

If I don't feel safe in the car its just not going to work. Sliding around on the stock seats does not qualify as safe to me. This last weekend at MRLS I realized that I need to do a complete overhaul on the "safety" aspects of the car because frankly, I scared the **** out of myself a few times. I'm the ******* in the overpowered quasi street car with stock seats and 3 points, you guys with the 6 points and race seats have a certain level of confidence beyond whats available to me. Go put the stock seat and 3 point back in your car and take a turn at 1.5+ sustained G's and tell me how that makes you feel. The turning point for me was when Ed's cousin asked for a ride and after thinking about it for a bit I kinda backed off and declined. I didn't want to risk someone else in the car with marginal safety equipment should I **** something up. Then, like the moron that I am, I eventually realized why am I risking MYSELF with marginal safety equipment? Seats, harnesses, helmet, possibly new roll bar are all on the table.

I don't have unlimited time or money for this project so I've been focusing on the hardware. Hardware is easy when you have been sitting on most of the parts for 4 years and all you need to do is assemble things. If I feel like the car is going to explode constantly, I'm never going to feel safe pushing it. I tend to buy really nice stuff from consistent vendors with good track records of quality and service. This has obviously bitten me in the *** in a couple places but for the most part its paid off quite well. For example, I mentioned before that the Trackspeed Radiator is a gem. With the reroute. The absolute last thing I worry about on track is my coolant temperatures and I'd like to see more systems in the car operating at that level. I feel like that's taken care of for right now, so I need to look at a couple other things. But they are not things that keep me from driving the car. I dunno, its hard to explain.

If I don't feel safe and I don't feel like the car is reliable then I'm never going to push it and I'm never going to learn anything.

I feel like I did things completely out of order. I should have put the safety equipment in the car first, then worked on my skills while driving N/A, then added boost.

But hey, boost is fun. I have few ragrets.

 

The noises your car made in front of me should have made this all worth it. Even if you did get passed my my hunk of junk.

 

SA2015's are coming out this month so there will be good deals on the SA2010's in the next few months

 

The good deals are already happening. I picked my helmet up for like 165 shipped. My black one.

 

Yes, but that hunk of junk on frozen tires is also being driven by someone with tons more track time than me at this point.

That's an HJC, right? Link would be rad, its a nice helmet and I've got nothing against a SA2010.

 

I wish I was confident/good enough at driving to take out other peoples cars. It would be fun to see what other setups feel like on the track.

 

Most club days at Laguna are a 91 db limit. That's low -- stock Corvettes and Mustangs have been known to fail sound. I don't actually know how loud my Miata is, but failing sound sucks.

--Ian

 

G has the mother of all mufflers though. And although his jet noises are loud I don't think they are that loud.

 

g's exhaust setup is the quietest miata 3" setup I've driven to date

 

Yep, pretty sure I done flatspotted dem tires. Time to add new rubber to the shopping list.

 

I've heard burnouts can solve the problem

 

Until I snap something trying to do burnouts on NT-01s

It's another $400-$500 I really didn't want to spend right now and probably can't justify until the end of November after bonus time. IF I get a bonus. I need to do some juggling and sort out my "needs" and "wants" for this project going forward into the next year or so.

Safety equipment comes first, then I can start thinking about buying and swapping more hardware.

 

After some of my slides at MRLS I would consider tires as safety equipment lol.

 

Yes, absolutely agreed. But I'm also not ice skating on my tires as-is soooo....

 

Quite true. Flat spots aren't good for grip either.

 

Oh yeah, its not ideal to be sure. But then my seat and restraint situation is worse than a couple flat spotted tires. Like I say, priorities.

 

I say skip the GT3 rollbar and get seats+harness+harness bar.

Roll bars aren't going to drop in value with use so you can always upgrade the rollbar later.

I distinctly remember you talking about the price of track days being expensive at MRLS. Just means you gotta save more

200 +-50 is standard at PIR, and PIR is much more boring than MRLS. Next summer I think I'm going to be spending more time at ORP and less at PIR. Probably won't spend a lot of time at PIR anymore unless I ever reach instructor status.

 

Yep, that's exactly it.

I'm somewhat torn between a full on race bucket and something like an Elise seat. I can put a proper harness in an Elise seat with a bit of work, so we'll see.

http://revlimiter.net/blog/2015/08/e...ommet-install/

http://www.sector111.com/parts/track...t_grommets.cfm