After the TSC Charity track day there was a bit of a gap between the next track event as CSCS was forced to re-schedule one of their events. Unfortunately the event at Grand Bend on August 16th was bumped by an NHRA event that was rained out earlier in the year. With limited time CSCS was able to secure the track on the 30th at Shannonville Motorsports Park in Shannonville, Ontario. I’m admitedly not a fan of SMP as I have been there many times years ago on my motorcycle and did not enjoy it. The track is VERY abbrasive, the in-field and run-off areas all are very bumpy and I have seen many bikes and cars destroy suspension and wheels after a small off track excursion. But this was where we had to compete for Round 4 so there’s not really much that can be done so no point in worrying about it. Since the last event the only major update to the car was finally getting a set of StopTech ST-40 Big Brakes for the front. I don’t want to give too much information as I’ll be doing a full write-up on these but they are a huge improvement over what I had, Factory Slider Calipers with Hawk HPS 5.0, even with the standard StopTech Street pads. Other then that I changed the rear diff fluid and engine oil/filter the day before the event. I had planned to do the transmission but ran out of time…more on this later..
We arrived to SMP around 830am and swapped over from the stock WRX wheels to the Team Dynamics/Hankook RS-3 that we’ve run for the past 2 race events and a few lapping days. They were wearing quite nicely and they definitely had more then enough life for the rest of the last event on September 20th. Our friend Charles, one of the CNC & Fabricators at MSI, was on hand with the Mooresport Support Trailer at the event so we set-up with him. There were only 2 groups being run and the time attack was being run on the very short Nelson circuit which i’ve never run before although I had been on about 3/4 of that layout running long track configuration. The Nelson layout is veyr short with only 2 major braking zones, a section of 3 consecutive hairpin turns and a fast entry turn 1. Because of the short nature of the track it was very difficult to get a clean lap in with all the traffic on track and minimal passing zones. Initially the car felt poor as I hadn’t checked the pressures to go out and the track temp was still relatively low. After raising the pressures up the car felt much better although the last part of the track really is not much fun in an AWD car unless you have it set-up well to rotate. Turn 1 is a pretty fast entry corner where confidence and feeling is very important. Looking at the data from the day I was entering the corner around 140KM/H and seeing a minimum speed in the corner of about 127KM/h. Being confident on entry and not using the brakes was important and then getting on the gas as soon as possible. Turn 2 is the first heavy braking zone and the StopTech BBK performed flawlessly here. This leads into another right turn and then a slight kink. What I believe is turn 4 is very tricky as the turn visually looks like it is much earlier then it is and it is a decreasing radius. Throughout the day as I got more comfortable I found that you could somewhat square off turn 4 and get a very good drive out of it rather then driving it in an arc. This leads into a very narrow “straight” section that lead to some very sketchy passing as the track is barely wide enough for 2 cars. This narrow section saw peak speeds of 140+ KM/H into the second heavy braking zone which then had 3 hairpins going right, left and right leading back onto the start/finish straight. The WRX is still running all factory suspension and I’ve only adjust the front camber bolts for max negative camber so it does not have a proper alignment. The hairpin section required a lot of patience on the throttle as it was easy to induce understeer.
Lap times were in the 1:02-1:04 range for most clean laps and it was difficult to really find places to make up large amounts of time. I ended up qualifying 4 of 4 with a 1:02 flat which I was happy with. I wasn’t able to really get many good laps in as I experienced fuel starvation on the WRX for the second time as the fuel level ran below 1/2 tank. The first time this happened was at iCar in the final time attack session through a high speed kink with a depression at exit. The engine would slowly lose power and then slowly come back to life. At iCar I had just over 1/4 tank but at SMP I started to experience fuel starvation at just under 1/2 a tank. The issue was occuring initially at the exit of turn 1 as I was shifting from 3rd to 4th gear the car. This was definitely a cause for concern as SMP was also the hardest track on fuel where I was using about 1/4 tank of fuel on a full session on track. I ended up driving to the closest Petro station about 25 minutes each way to fill the car back up to full. Better to have added weight then starve the car of fuel, right? I will be looking into whether this is a sloshing issue or something with the DI system that is going to continue. I believe it is an issue with the in-tank/lift pump and fuel sloshing as I never once had fuel starvation at DDT or TMP. Radium Engineering offers a pretty sweet new in tank set-up with a nice baffled “sump” which may be an option to solve this.
Going out last on track for the time attack session definitely allowed me to set a large gap with the car in front of me and just run my own laps without any pressure. First flying lap would be my fastest of the 3 with a 1:02.235, laps 2 and 3 were 1:02.596 and 1:02.797 respectively via the AIM SoloDL that I use for all on track timing. This ended up putting me in 2nd place for the day which was a huge surprise and I am pumped to move up a step from the 2 thirds that i’ve had this year. This result bumped me into 3rd spot for the season championship with a very very long shot at moving to first depending on the results of the last event. However there is a bad side to this which is that I have hurt a bearing inside the transmission which now whines on decel all the time. We haven’t found the source of the noise yet but we did replace 2 of the 4 bearings in the center diff area with no change. We’re waiting on the other 2 bearings to come off back-order as one of the 2 we didn’t do did not feel smooth. I believe this could have been avoided if I had taken the time to change the transmission fluid the night before. I believe the root cause is the tight slow turns and abrasive surface which caused the fluid to overheat and ultimately lead to bearing wear/failure. Hopefully we can get this fixed before the 20th but if not we’ll just have to run it as is and deal with it later. The lesson here is that it is important to replace the OEM fluids as they are just not up to the task of extended track use.
Thanks to these companies that are helping with this Project
COBB Tuning – COBB AccessPORT and COBB Cat-Back
Mad Graphics – Full Vehicle Vinyl Wrap and Side Graphics
Grimmspeed – License Plate Relocation Kit
Turn In Concepts – Shifter Bearing and TGV Deletes
Killer B Motorsports – J-Pipe
OnPoint Dyno – Dyno Tuning and Testing
Uni-Body Collision – Paint Work (Emblems, Lip, Trunk Spoiler)
StopTech – Front Big Brake Kit
