"In a spin"

Time for my 5th track day! The day started off at 6:30 looking extremely wet, and I drove with my passenger to the track worried that we were going to have to drive with the soft-top up and my helmet bashing against the roof on every corner! However, by the time I found Kemble, the rain had stopped, leaving the airfield nicely saturated for a great morning session of skidding about. Luckily the rain held off, which made it possible to drive all day with the hood down (hooray!), and the track dried out slowly - this made it a wonderfully varied day of driving, going from full-wet and puddly, to damp, to patches of wet and dry, and finally to totally dry just in time for my final session.

Joining us for the day were a large contingent of club MX5's, and a variety of others - 3 or 4 caterhams, a porsche 944 turbo, a Renault Clio, an Impreza, a Mitsubishi Evo, our old friend the Ariel Atom, and an old Lotus-tweaked Cortina.

The day started with the usual briefing and all cars were tested for noise levels. The limit for the day was 103dB and I was wondering how loud that was! The test required holding the car at 4500rpm for 10 seconds while a gauge was held about 1 metre behind the exhaust. Stock exhausts seemed to weigh in at around 70dB, while my dual exhaust was a more respectable 88dB (although I wondered how much of my noise was not measured because it was sneaking out the other exahust tip!! ;-) I was surprised that what seems a fairly noisy exhaust was still so far below 'illegal' levels - although my car is definitely much noisier with the throttle fully open! The only car to fail the test was the cortina, which they eventually got on track after stuffing something into the exhaust to muffle it a bit!

Then we hit the track! We followed a pace car for about 3 laps to learn the basic shape of the circuit, then as it was an 'open pit lane' I went out for a short session (only about 4 laps, 5 miles) to get the layout of the circuit in my mind and try to find basic racing lines for the corners, and then let the others queueing out on the track for their first go. A couple of times I approached a forest of cones and couldn't see the gap, which was a bit nerve-wracking, but after a couple of laps I had found all the gaps and there was no problem finding them again!

The scariest thing though was that the track was very wet, which concerned me quite a lot - my original set of tyres on th car had been terrible in the wet, and after several near-disasters at very low speeds, I had become a very slow and tentative driver in those conditions. I had changed to Bridgestone SO2's which give amazing grip in the wet, but until this track day I still had very little experience in the wet (just a few days driving on normal roads). I started off very tentatively, especially as the big hairpin seemed to be very slippery indeed, but I was pleased to finally have a chance to learn the limits of my car in the wet in a safe and controlled environment.

For my second session, about 9 miles on track, I started to increase my speed, but was still driving very slowly, just learning the lines, and testing the grip very carefully - I really don't want to hurt my car! I let several of the more experienced drivers past in this session.

The third session (about 12 miles) I started to push to find the grip. I decided to drop into 2nd gear on the big hairpin at one end of the track, and give it a bit of juice to try to kick the back end out and do a bit of a powerslide - but it was so slippery in the wet that I had barely touched the throttle when the car snapped into a quick 180 degree spin! Chastened, I nipped back round and drove on, feeling angry with myself that I had been too slow on the clutch to stop the car stalling.

I wasn't the only one to spin here (I think most people did!) - the next lap, the Ariel Atom had a spin in the same spot, and was not so lucky, nurfing a pile of tyres marking the end of the corner. One tyre was knocked into the middle of the road. I approached, saw the yellow flags being waved, slowed down, and saw the Ariel parked out of the way with the driver checking his car over for damage; but until I was deep in the corner, the tyre itself was hidden behind a small rise in the road. Despite driving slower for the yellow flags, when I finally saw the tyre loom into view, my jerky attempt to dive to the right of it resulted in another 180 degree spin! So much for my 'only ever spun once' record!! Luckily this was mainly down to incompetence on the wet and slippery corner rather than speed, and I was only doing about 20-25mph, so it was over quickly and without tears! However, it reminded me to take yellow flags very seriously! I may be able to drive fairly fast now, but I know I have an awful lot still to learn!

Up until lunchtime I increased my speed slightly, and put a lot of concentration into learning to powerslide around the big hairpin. I wobbled and skidded a lot, and managed one more little spin, this time getting my rear wheels just onto the grass. However, by lunchtime, while my technique wasn't exactly pretty (well, I think I did it beautifully just once!), I was feeling a lot more confident that I could control the slide a bit, and was starting to really enjoy sliding the car about - the MX5 really does inspire me with confidence, now that I've learned not to jab my foot on the accelerator and brake pedals so much!

After a disappointing lunch (the temporary cafe facilities are almost non existent as yet), I hit the track again, now managing the wet corners at much more respectable speeds, and a lot more comfortable with the mixture of wet and dry patches - these certainly made the big hairpin interesting, as the grip levels would leap up and down as you went around the corner from dry to wet and back again!

Then Andy C took me for a ride in his 10AE, which was great fun, and also very interesting to see the lines he took, and the difference that his wider tyres, bilstein shocks, and Torsen LSD make over my more standard 1.8i. We then swapped, and I took him out for a few laps. We were relaxed and chatting, and this took the edge off my concentration, so when I ran a bit wide on entry to the big hairpin then hit a wet patch, I got too wide to recover in time, and had to cut across the grass (only about 6 feet before I was back on tarmac). I decided I'd better concentrate, so I shut up and drove more carefully, for an incident-free few laps.

Into the afternoon I found I was still finding better lines for some of the corners. I found faster ways through almost all of the corners, and found myself starting to use the throttle to steer to car. I was really enjoying the pit-straight chicane - Just about red-lining in 3rd (83mph) as I reached the braking point, I would brake down to about 75mph, flick into the chicane, then bury the throttle and mow some grass on the 2nd apex, the car would bounce and the wheels spin, then it would bite and take off down the straight - I found this corner absolutely thrilling, although I approached the 'wall of tyres' with a knot of fear in my stomach every time! Another great spot was the long right-hander into the tight chicane. I took this very wide on entry, then clipped a late apex (close to the last large cone on the corner), with the car sliding very slightly on the edge of its grip - then to complete the corner, I would ease off the throttle for a moment and the rear end would just lose grip and shift around to point the car perfectly into the next corner - it felt amazing to have such a feeling of control, although it took a lot of practice before I was getting it right on most laps!

I then followed Gordon B in his turbo 1.6i, which gave me a chance to see how our cars compared in acceleration and cornering. He could pull out a fair lead down the short straights, but my 1.8's slightly better brakes helped me reel him in a bit into the corners, so we ended up lapping quite evenly matched. We both really enjoyed this 'driving in formation' (because of course it's not competitive!). His turbo wasn't optimised very much on the day, so I look forward to seeing how well it goes once he's got everything tuned up - it should be sweet!

In the only slow point of the day, I got stuck behind a lotus Elise. He seemed to think that I was 'only an MX5' and therefore slower than him, and I was stuck behind him for about 6 laps. I was about to give up when he finally let me through, and I was able to pick up my pace again and romped away from him! I think he realised I was quite a bit faster then, as on the next session when I caught him again, he pulled over to let me pass after only one corner! I know that the Elise is a faster car than mine, but it still felt nice to overtake him!

In the final session of the day, I then pushed myself to get the 'toblerone chicane' (pictured above) nailed - just after the scary solid-looking chicane was a wet patch against a curved wall of cones which drained all confidence for putting down all the power on the exit from the chicane. In the last session, the patch was almost dry and after 3 laps I managed to summon the courage to accelerate flat-out through the chicane and down the straight. I was really thrilled that I'd managed to push to that point, as it was really quite scary (as another driver said after he did the same - It really required balls!); but the car happily took it in its stride, and for the remaining laps I found it was not a problem so long as you forced yourself to keep the power down - easing off in mid corner could have caused expensive (if superficial) damage!

Wear and tear
I went to the track with about 1mm of legal tread remaining on the left side of the car. Determined to finish off my set of tyres so I could buy a new set of boots straight afterwards, I set about turning a nice set of SO2s into slicks. Powersliding around hairpins achieves this remarkably well. Pictured here are my right (top) and left (bottom) rear tyres at the end of the day!! They really are quite grippy in the dry now! ;-)

By the end of the day I had covered 103.9 miles on track at an economy of 18 miles per gallon. Tyre wear was about 1mm all round plus something like 3mm on the outer shoulder of my left-hand-side tyres. I am extremely pleased with my EBC GreenStuff v4 brake pads - They wore by about 1mm, hardly produced any brake dust and had a lot more bite than the stock pads. And even better, unlike the stock pads, they did not get glazed by the heat, so worked perfectly straight after leaving the track - the stock pads always took about 2 weeks (200 miles) of normal driving before they would feel normal and fully-functional again.

Home time :-(
The drive home through the Cotswolds was gorgeous, warm and sunny, with a fabulous sunset. I don't quite know what I drove through on the return journey but my car came out of it looking like a small muddy hill with a windscreen mounted on top! I was just about to get out the camera to get a snapshot of its dreadful state when the heavens opened up and I ran for cover - this is how it looked in the morning after most of the mud had been washed off!!

I really enjoyed the whole day, because the weather conditions and track layout left me with new things to learn and more time to be gained all the way around the circuit, not to mention quite a few exciting incidents, so I didn't get bored or tired of it - around Donington and Silverstone, I always felt tired and a little bit disinterested by the last session, but Kemble always seemed to have one more new thing to try, which kept me really enthusiastic all day. I was beginning to feel a bit jaded about track days, but now I'm keener than ever to hit the track again (but I think I'll wait till winter's over first!!)

Wahey!

Jason Williams, October 20, 2001

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