Shaking Off the Cobwebs

I wasn't expecting to run Lupa until next weekend but Mark reminded me that the Metro NY Porsche Club was running this weekend at Tobay Beach and with a forecast of 60F and sunny, it was an opportunity I couldn't pass up. Despite losing an hour of sleep due to the daylight savings time change, Mark and I were up before sunrise to get there just as the sun was rising over Ocean Parkway. We didn't really have to get there that early but from past experience, everyone is always a bit sluggish during the first event of the season so we always give ourselves some buffer to avoid having to rush.

Metro NY PCA - Tobay Beach - 3/13/2016

Tobay Beach isn't a particularly large lot so the course was the usual slalom/offsets up, turnaround sweeper followed by a slalom/offsets back. The Porsche club always finds a way to make this particularly difficult though with narrow gates and 30% smaller cones that has always messed up visuals for me. Since I don't get to drive that much anymore, I find determining how far I am from the cones difficult even with normal sized cones so the smaller cones present an even greater challenge for me. I think I got one clean run the entire day haha. I wasn't concerned about that though since my main objective for today was to start working on a baseline setting to make her feel well balanced and predictable.

Porsche club baby cones - 3/13/2016

Without knowing how Lupa would respond to the new shock valving, I set all the knobs to the middle setting, front bar at 5/6 and rear bar at full soft, tire pressures 30psi all around and did my first few runs. It took a few runs to get heat in the tires enough to actually start making changes. At first, the front wasn't biting much so I lowered front compression significantly and increased the rebound a little to get the nose down and I was able to get the turn in I wanted. In the turnaround sweeper, I noticed the balance was slightly off so I raised the rear bar to 2/7 and that was enough to get her the work well getting power down through the sweeper without much drama. The rear was also bouncing back a bit too quickly so I dialed the rebound up a bit in the rear too which made the damping just right.

In grid getting ready to run - 3/13/2016

Tobay isn't really the kind of lot you want to be doing lots of suspension tuning on since the grip level doesn't really mirror any location we'd run a big event on but I'm generally happy with the baseline I set up from today. She's neutral in the sweepers allowing you to get fairly aggressive while powering through it and still being easy to catch if you push the go pedal a bit too hard. I need to tweak turn in and transition speed. She's decently quick and even with my rusty driving, she was putting down respectable times so she has pace but I have a few more suspension adjustments I want to try next week at the Meadowlands and then I think we can have a usable starting point for the season.

MetroNY PCA - Tobay Beach, NY - 3/13/2016

The weather was perfect...in fact the best first season even I've been to in the 10 years I've been in this sport. The sun was up, the temps were cool and there wasn't an overwhelming breeze from the ocean that usually plagues us year after year. I don't think I could've picked a better way to start the season. Most importantly, it just felt great to be out there again pushing our cars to the limit, having fun and seeing friends that I haven't seen all winter. Hopefully we can finish dialing her in during the next few events and be ready for the first big race in DC in May.