March 8th Motorkhana

Ran another one of AEM's Motorkhana events last weekend. And with my best result yet - came 5th overall. About bloody time too. The car is too good to be running in the 20's. It's just a shame the driver isn't there yet.

I have to say, however, that 5th place was earnt mostly through not stuffing up, and the car basically behaving itself. All the other Birkin drivers had their dramas throughout the day. Frank's gearbox wasn't happy moving to second (leading to some interesting gearchanges), Conrad managed to go straight past a turn at full throttle in third, necessitating a rapid reverse back onto the course, and Tim had a shocking first round. He managed to hit a cone, then turn his engine off with his knee hitting the key, then overran the garage. Mind you, this was his first attempt at this event, and his final run was the 10th fastest of the round.

You also have to keep in mind that the timing is done by hand. I came ahead of Frank by 0.2 seconds, which is 0.05 seconds per run over four runs. Now you cannot tell me that someone with a stopwatch is that accurate.

Round 1 was the usual 'getting to know you' run. A bit of oversteer, which is becoming standard for my car at the moment, and needs some looking into. I also found the new tyres a bit glassy still, so the first run scrubbed them up well. The comment I got coming back in was that I was braking far too early - a few pointers of where I should be braking, a few 'you must be bloody joking' comments later, and I had a plan in mind.




Round 2 was where I implemented the plan. I think I did what I was supposed to. It all becomes a bit hard to follow, really. Unfortunately, my main evidence was going to be the video, but there's no sound this time around and therefore I'm not 100% sure of where my braking points were in reality. I know they were supposed to be around 15m before the turn, which when you're travelling at 100kph (my little Performance Box doing its thing), is half a second before the turn. In that time you have to brake, upshift to second, and begin the turn. Personally, I can't believe that's right, but I look at the video and it seems to be correct.

Mind you, I'm not stopping for the corner, so all I'm really doing is scrubbing off enough speed to make the corner. So for some of them it's probably just knocking off 20kph, as I can take some of these bends at 80kph.

The key difference was the time - I dropped 0.9 seconds from one run to the next, which is actually huge, and worth several places over four laps. Unfortunately, I forgot to set the video on this run.

Rounds 3 and 4 - well, pretty much the same, really. Just focusing in on braking points mainly.





Again, a lot of fun. Each time I get out of the car I'm shaking from the adrenaline, and I'm exhausted at the end of the day. I don't know how people do hours of racing.....

I'm going to have a look at the results from the Performance Box and see what my braking points are like - what speed to I drop to, where was I quicker etc. There may be some insights there, or perhaps just too much data for me to cope with.