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I did have a little bit of a surprise with the brakes using the Stop Tech Street Performance pads. Remember, this was my first time tracking the car without my ghetto cooling ducts zip-tied on. The brakes and pads actually got pretty hot! Even hotter than when I tracked in 40F hotter ambient temps. For the first time ever, I actually smelled brake pad! This occurred coming down the front straight at 100mph and braking down to around 35-40mph. There was never an issue with fade or braking power, just that I could actually smell the brakes in the hard braking zone along with getting some heat into the rotors. Really, the main surprise was how WELL my super ghetto brake cooling ducts performed.
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| Note to self: always use the brake cooling ducts, even if the ambient temperature is only 55F. Notice the slight bluing of the rotor from the heat. Tracking in 40 degree F hotter weather with the brake ducts kept the heat level lower. |
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| Who knew 2″ neoprene ducting zip-tied on worked so well? I’m going to work on a permanently mounted solution in the future that’s much more elegant. |
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| The rear brakes exhibited their usual slight blueness after coming off the track. I recently came up with a cooling solution for them too. Now I just need time to design the cooling ducts. |
As predicted, the S2000 and SE-R were very closely matched. The SE-R had a very clear acceleration advantage; when I was WOT going down the front straight, I could tell Martin was backing off the throttle to stay behind me. Any gap I had leading onto the front straight evaporated pretty quickly as Martin was able to easily close right up onto the back of my car. Draft or not, the SE-R had the acceleration advantage. In the corners, it was pretty even. Martin and I traded positions doing a lead-follow just having fun, and were mixed in with other traffic. Though we were dicing around with traffic, there was no clear advantage either way in the corners.
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| A shot of one of the Bridgestone Potenza RE-11s after 14 track sessions, about 60 auto-x runs, and 20k miles. They are still pretty sticky and have a couple thousand street miles left in them. |
