Planning for this event started about 4 days prior. With the fire mess fixed from the last Autobahn event, the car was mostly ready, but not truly stress tested. Since the fire, we managed to pull the entire drivetrain out of the car and replaced every wire in the engine bay along with many other vacuum lines and hoses. We did take it to an autocross event to give it a brief shakedown, but that’s nothing compared to 20 minutes 100mph+ driving around a track.
So with only a few days to prepare for Gingerman, every minute after work until late in the night was spent working and preparing the car. Turbo swap (back to the stock IX turbo), new rotors, all fresh fluids, tire changing (fresh A6’s), and build a new splitter to replace the flimsy melted one. Work on the car didn’t stop until late Friday evening when we were fighting some weird boost/knock issues. A few PM’s exchanged with Ron at RS-Motors and we both agreed to try a new knock sensor. Installed the new sensor and the car pulled perfect, no knock, full boost, ready to go racing! Loaded the car up and left for Gingerman at 11:55pm Friday.
Forgetting about the time zone change, we arrived at Gingerman just in time for the drivers meeting. After the meeting, we had about an hour to unload car, re-install wing, splitter, side skirts, and give it a full check over.
The first few sessions we left the BFG R1S’s on and tried to really learn the track. It was 5 years ago I was last at Gingerman, so pretty much had to re-learn it all over again, plus they’ve added turn 10B which is a very tricky bit to get right.
Seconds were dropping every session. At the 4th session we decided to toss on the new Hoosiers. We finished Saturday with a best of 1:36.239. We knew there was more time to pickup, so Saturday evening was spent looking over traqmate data and video. With the car working 100% flawlessly and no problems to address, we started tuning and making adjustments to the suspension setup. We knew we were going to have to work hard to catch both Geff (TTS NASA National Champ) in his Z06 and Greg with his Lotus Cup car.
Sunday, this as it, the first two morning sessions were nice a cool. This was our chance to knock off some time before it became really hot out. With some changes to the rear sway bar, shocks, and tire pressures, we turned a 1:35.732 which would be our quickest lap time of the weekend putting us in 2nd place for Sunday.
All-in-all, it was a great weekend. Not a single car issue at all, no fires, no brake problems, nothing. Even the small oil system changes that we made showed positive results. We will be back again with some more improvements, and we will close that gap on Geff….
Thanks as always goes to those that helped throughout the entire process!
Some in car video and pictures, Enjoy:
Sorry for the really poor audio. Had to resort to using the POV.HD as our GoPro2 decided to stop working.
Photos by Noah Kuehmichel (the same Noah that sells the lube: Amsoil by Noah)
