Unfortunately Japanese Nationals didn't go to plan today. First turn of the flying first lap of the first session and I stuffed it up. Went in way too hot for the cold tires, lost it and put it deep in to the gravel trap.
Felt like a real rookie sitting in the gravel waiting to get towed out. I'd been looking forward to this event for a while and for it to finish so early was heartbreaking.
I ended up peeling 2 tires off the beads while going sideways in the gravel, very lucky it didn't roll. Got towed out, got all 4 tired unmounted and remounted, but one was damaged so I was unable to continue. I emptied all of the gravel out of the car and loaded it back on to the trailer. Once I got it home, I cleaned it and put it up on stands to assess the damage.
It still runs and drives straight, I don't think I've done any mechanical damage but I'm yet to go crawling under the car. Cosmetically though, the left side of the car has a lot of scuffing at low level from the gravel. The wheels all look really scratched up and I cracked my wing mirror glass from the stones pelting it. The good thing is though that the splitter held on nice and strong even filled up with all that gravel. It shows that I've built it strong enough.
I also need to replace all 4 tires. I was thinking that this event was going to be the last event for this set as at the last event they felt average. Looking at them now, they feel pretty hard. Apparently these AR1s are fairly limited for heat cycles and I think they've had it. Goes a long way to explaining why the grip was so poor, especially because they were cold. It was still totally my fault - I shouldn't have gone in so hot until I'd experimented with the grip of the car.
It's not quite the data I was hoping to get from the weekend, however it was quite interesting to look at my spin. It shows an approach of 190kph, on the brakes, then rolled in to the turn at around 160kph. I got sideways at around 150kph, tried to catch it by loading on some opposite lock and giving it some throttle as you can see from the data. At this point I was at around 1.2 lateral Gs. The rear kept on coming around though, and at this point I was out of lock without switching my hands on the wheel. I've never done this before but I did it out of desperation. The car gripped but by then the wheels were pointing the wrong way and it flicked me the wrong way. I spun, went in to the gravel backwards at around 125kph and around 2 lateral Gs. I then spun a further 180 degrees and stopped about 2m from the concrete barrier.
Looking back, I maybe should have held the wheel in my normal grip and held the lock I had. I'm confident I was coming off anyway, it was coming around too quick and there was no grip, but it may have had a better outcome. In saying that, it could have bit the gravel even more sideways than it did and rolled, so who knows. It's easy to look back in critique your reaction after the fact, but in the car, feeling what you are and having a very short amount of time to react, it's a little different.
At the end of the day, it's lesson learnt and a good result that I didn't roll or hit the fence. Looking forward to getting back out there again once I replace the tires and give the car a good check over.
Anyway, here's the in car footage. At least the new Motec C125 dash looks on point!
https://youtu.be/teY9Ng61dP8