xmatt

A while back I did a day at the PalmerSport driving experience. One of the best parts of the day is a little 250hp pseudo-F1 style single-seater with on-board video to record your laps. Unfortunately it was raining buckets that day so the track was insanely slick and speeds were reduced even on the wet-weather tires. But in any case, here are some highlights from my run, a couple of spins included:

[media]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zRjgQ_E6HkQ [/media]

Stephenopoly

Very coool! that looked like a blast!

JonBoy

Looks like a ton of fun.

zachismisitok

I enjoyed the video, looks like fun


how much track time have you had before? I'm curious because I'm wondering how hard it is to actually drive those

xmatt

I've done a lot of autocrossing over a number of years, but no real track experience. That said, the car is actually pretty easy to drive, and it's not really that close to a real F1 car. It is a very light open-wheel car with a lot of aerodynamic downforce and a sequential gearbox. You only have to use the clutch to get started from a stop. Here's a picture I took of one of the cars:



I feel like I could have driven it much better than you see there -- my lines are mostly crap -- but because they're trying to take you through so many different kinds of cars (and on different tracks for each of them), you get very little seat time in each. That video is shortened from about a 10 minute video of my total time in that car, and I spent most of it trying to figure out my line and deal with the rain. I finally feel like I got it right at the very end before I got checker flagged and had to pit in. The weirdest thing to me was feeling the effect of the downforce; the car had way more grip at high speed than low speed.

But yeah, it really is a blast. I'd love to just do a full day in the single-seater and forget about the other cars they had us drive. Makes me want an Ariel Atom.

liquid_helix136

Im assuming that was a supercharger whine in the video?

either that or a VERY noisy diff?

looks awesome

JonBoy

That's actually gearbox noise. It has straight-cut gears (like most race cars).

xmatt

Yeah, it was definitely the gearbox making all the whining. The motor is an NA Jaguar V6.

CKit

Have you generally autocrossed cars with ABS?

xmatt

[QUOTE=CKit,Jan 4 2010, 12:59 PM] Have you generally autocrossed cars with ABS?