Posted by I’d put quite a lot of thought into deciding when I’d start my track day season in 2017, although there are days in February/March where the weather is “good” generally track temperatures are low meaning the tyres simply don’t work well enough. In my mind late April seemed to be a good bet for a dry track and reasonable temperatures, how wrong I was!
I’d manage to luck into a period of unseasonal cold weather (5-6 degrees Celsius) and to add to that it was also wet. I’d probably say that 2/3rds of the day was under wet conditions with the sun finally coming out for the last 2 hours of the day. Because cold and damp isn’t enough we also had at least 3 hailstorms during the day. The tricky track conditions also lead to a number of stoppages for cars sliding off the track which did make getting a rhythm slightly more difficult.
One of the additions for this season is my home built Arduino based data logger, this was the first real test and apart from a few teething problems (GPS speed not properly converted from knots to mph and the accelerometer not recording values) it went pretty well and you can see the results in the attached videos.
Overall a good day with over 60 laps completed in pretty tricky conditions, I managed to stay on the track (came close to falling off a few times) but have a few more small jobs to work on.
Now the video, firstly in the wet including quite a moment at Riches caused by braking far too late into the corner…
Now in the mostly dry!