Another PDG GTM milestone

[Cobra 61]

I am honored to announce that Johannes Van Overbeek will be our guest driver on Friday's test day at Thunderhill in preparation for this year's 25 hour race in December. He will be assisting us in driver feedback and see if we can improve on some lap times. there will be plenty of pictures an in-car camera stuff to post! I think this says a lot about the GTM and FFR and what kind of car it can become! Veteran PDG driver, David Ray will be testing along with guest driver, Matt Robison. Matt is the owner and driver of a 69 Mercury, 1000 HP SCCA stockcar. (merc9.com). This is an incredible road-race machine! To this date, Johannes is the most accomplished professional driver we will have in the GTM. (he called us, we didn't call him!)


See you at the races,
Cobra 61

[fastthings]

Nice

[noother]

Any updates? How did it go?

[crash]

It went well. We didn't break the 1:50.xx lap time barrier, which is somewhat of our goal, but we are getting mighty close. Car ran pretty well, but we are changing a couple details to try and make it faster.

[fastthings]

So, did Johannes Van Overbeek leave any comments of the consruction or handling?

[Martin]

How does that compare to last year? Is that before/after any engine upgrades?

It went well. We didn't break the 1:50.xx lap time barrier, which is somewhat of our goal, but we are getting mighty close. Car ran pretty well, but we are changing a couple details to try and make it faster.

[crash]

Our theoretical fastest lap time, which is where the computer takes all the data from a run and combines the best cornering and straight away speeds to predict a lap time if everything was done as fast as it could be for that particular session, was a time that was as fast as we have ever run at Thunderhill. This was with a pro driver that said he thought there was quite a bit more, but needed some more time in the car. This was WITHOUT any engine upgrades. Actually the engine was probably down on power due to an increase in voltage to the fuel pumps because of the new wiring, and thus the pressure was higher at the injectors and it was running a tad bit rich. We didn't find this until studying the data, and it is easily fixed with a fuel regulator adjustment, but it certainly could have knocked a few horse power out of it during this test session. These types of things are EXACTLY why it is critical to test and have computers recording data.

To answer your question more directly, this was a faster lap time than what we qualified with in last years 25 hour race. It should also be noted that the air temp was VERY hot this last weekend, and it is usually very cool in december during the 25, so we are definitely moving in the right direction.

[Cobra 61]

This is what was said of the car. He liked driving the car. He felt the front areo was not balanced with the rear as the rear has to much. He was confident in saying that the brakes are good but we could be loosing between 1.5 and 2 full seconds with our current application. We are running stock c-5 front calipers on all four corners. They are cost effective and if we do find a package, you have to be careful of sky rocketing maintenance costs. The current package costs about 700.00 a year to service (8 races, rotors and pads). Everything else was very good. Other drivers with a new front end alignment set up felt the steering was a little heavy this time, however, the mid speed push we have tolerated for 5 years is non existent!

Jim's new sway bar design worked well out of the box! On the last session we made a change and got better corner speed and stability.