Project FR-S: Interim Progress Report

Going in cold, Dai ripped the skidpad at 0.94 G’s, aided by our project’s wider 265 tires.  Project FR-S exhibited almost no body roll or understeer.  Dai could have improved his time with more practice.  Visually Project FR-S looked so much better, like a race car.  The car was capable of performing a 4 wheel drift around the circle.

On the road course the stock FR-S had a decent amount of body motion, but it felt light and tossable.  The FR-S had very little understeer and had a tendency to oversteer at the corner exit.  The low grip skinny stock tires felt like they were holding the car back. We felt that the stock FR-S was a little too tail happy,  the stock FR-S slipped and slithered its way around to a lap time of 34.2 seconds.

The Ticket To Ride FR-S was greatly improved and felt even lighter on its feet than the stock car.   It had much less body motion which made the car more controllable and reduced the tail’s tendency to suddenly step out.  The TTR FR-S felt stable and well balanced.  With more power, brakes and handling the Ticket to Ride FR-S circled our test track at a much quicker 32.5 second pace.

Our car was built to shred road courses and Project FR-S kicked ass and took names.  Looking flat and tight with no understeer at all and lots of corner exit grip, our car didn’t even look like a tuned streetcar but an all out race car.  It is amazing to see this sort of body motion control, grip and nimbleness in a street car that basically has a better ride than stock.  Dai reported that the car handled perfectly and didn’t need a single change.  We stuck Tyler McQuarrie behind the wheel for a few laps and he reported the same thing raving about how good our car was!  For pros to say that without a single adjustment is pretty amazing. Our car circled the track in 29.5 seconds, a really fast pace.  Both drivers felt that they could have gone at least another second faster if they’d had as much seat time with our car as they did with the other cars.

Our car showed that our experience in set up was a big advantage.  To be fair our car also has more suspension work, more brakes and wider tires than the other cars as well.  Overall, we were more than pleased with our results.  We also know that we could have generated even better numbers if we and the drivers had enjoyed more time with Project FR-S.