Which tires were you using?

 

Exciting!

I'm spending the day in the office shoveling paper.

 

Running the Nittos. At lunch now. No time to swap the Hoosiers before 1. Clicked off a 1:54.7 first session on the big track.....0.4 faster than my best lap ever in the GT500.....GPS said top speed 142 even though speedo showed over 150 ...... this car is awesome ....The best comment of the day so far from a Porsche driver I passed "wow you guys were running a lot faster than I thought you would"

 

Nice work...you shooting in-car video? Can't wait for TracKey!

 

Holy cow!!! 2 seconds better than the GT500 and with only a little seat time? How much faster do you think you'll be once you're very familiar with the Boss?

 

Buddy of mine just got to drive one at Hallett and commented on how well it pulled in 4th.

 

that is funny, at my track day all of the instructors race spec boxter class around the country. they were all nice, but thy asked who all has "american iron" and then started giving all these warnings about understeer, bad breaks, poor handling and being careful. sitting in the paddock waiting to go the head instructor walks up and goes, wow this car has real brakes on it. my instructor drove the first two laps and was telling me how he wasn't going to push it because the brakes "will fade" after two turns he goes wow the brakes are great and the car is so neutral and them boom we were hauling **** around that track like he was crazy. i was scrambling trying to find something to grab. he said probably five times in two laps how great the car handles and how neutral it is.

 

Coming from an Evo, my impression was the the American Muscle cars were more oversteer, lots of torque available from turn in thru mid corner and track out. I always witnessed Vipers and Vettes going off, with amateur drivers of course.

 

The car handles very neutral and is easy to induce oversteer on corner exit if you want to. The Porsche folks I run with at the track now know this car is the "real deal" based on my lap times with stock tires.

 

What a bunch of strokers

 

Not shocking though.

 

I only had a chance to run the Nittos. They combined the groups to make up for lost time so we were running 25 minute sessions with 5 minutes between two groups. I barely had time to check pressures, refill the gas tank and down a Gatorade between sessions, let alone swap tires. I'm tired! Wow what fun though. I think my friend and I in his 5.0 (with a lot of the Boss parts) repped the Boss pretty well. All day long there were M3 and Porsche guys coming up to look at the cars and commenting about how fast they were. We really had a good time even though we got rained out of Saturday. I think what surprised them the most is that we pretty much sat out Saturday in the rain while about half of them ran. I think they mistook us for "waxers" even though almost universally the ones we talked to that ran in the rain said they wished they hadn't. The two that put theirs into the wall really wished they hadn't I learned a while ago that there's just no upside to running HPDE in the rain. You can go faster on the interstate on street tires.

 

It does pull well in 4th. It still pulls pretty well in 5th too. I pulled to about 7100 in 5th before lifting heading into turn 1. That's somewhere around 148 mph on the 26.3" rear tires I was running. It was still pulling hard, but you just can't screw up 1 or you're in the woods which makes for a bad day. I'm going to put the Laguna Seca spoiler on to try and get more downforce so I can take 1 deeper. It has a pretty good bank to it so it's the perfect corner to take advantage of additional aero. For reference I hit 160 mph in the GT500 before lifting in Turn 1 so talk about pulling! The Boss handled the corners so much better though that I made up all the time there and then some.

 

Sounds like a fun day. Those were the NT05's? Did you pass any GT3's out there?

 

Actually 0.4 seconds faster, but that was on my first session! I ran several 1:55s along with the 1:54.7 so it was consistently fast. I only ran 1:55.1 in the GT500 once and otherwise was 1:56-1:58. Unfortunately the rest of the day I kept running into traffic so never got another "clean" lap, but there's definitely more there with more seat time.

 

At least 3 or 4 colors of them There was a really fast GT3 RS though and he got by me. It was completely track prepped though and I'm sure cost 4 to 5 times the Boss.....at least.

Tires were 555RII

 

There weren't any yahoos with video cameras around

There were several places where TracKey would have helped I'm sure. The short straight from 3 to 4 required me to shift 3rd to 4th and back to 3rd fairly quickly. I had to go up to 4th just as I entered 6 and was a little low on torque through 7 and 8 but they're pretty fast rhythm corners so not a big deal. It's just that going through 9 under the bridge I felt low on torque....I would get into 5th again about halfway to 10 then have to bang back through 4th to 3rd to head into the front straight. I'm really curious to see if TracKey can help pull through some of those spots a little harder.

 

This is just for you Drew. One of the guys at the track was shooting pics and sent me a few of the Mustangs at BIR. My favorite was the first one from the one session we ran on the short track picking my way through traffic. After the track dried out we moved to the big track where the rest of the pics are shot. My buddy's driving the Grabber Blue GT.

 

Nice #9. Hey did you pass that 997 GT3 in the first photo? Is your friend running the same wheel/tire setup as you? I like the black wing and mirror shells on your friends car. All he needs are some C stripes.

 

I am in the process of passing him on the left after passing the other three cars previously.

He's running a square setup with Enkei 18 x 9.5 PF01 (45mm offset) on 275/40/18 NT01s. He has the Boss front spoiler, Laguna Seca wing (ordered for my car), Torsen diff, Steeda CAI and tune, MM c/c plates, Steeda sport springs, Koni Yellows, adj 35mm front sway bar and 22 mm rear bar. He's going to order the Boss intake this week. Yep all he needs now are some C stripes