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A little history: For those who don't know I had detroyed my engine at Texas World Speedway earlier in March, the engine seized up at 6000rpm on decceleration while I was barelling down the front straight at 140mph. Due to the extent of the damage it was not possible to figure the exact cause, but most likely it was damaged bearings from over-revving/mis-shifting several times during the event. There were no signs of detonation on the pistons and datalogs. Several people I taked to at Zcon thought it was from running my engine at the edge over the last 2 years but I actually do tune very conservatively, my maps are more conservative than JWT for example. But when you go to track events so often it is difficult to avoid accidents, such as mis-shifting to 2nd gear instead of 4th and revving the engine over 9000rpm :) I have learnt that it is not possible to make an engine bullet-proof, so it is better *not* to invest everything into one build and to hold something in reserve. Up till this point the Z was my daily driver, so I had to get something else to drive (picked up John Yim's truck). While waiting on the machine shop to finish the new engine, I decided to make the Z a dedicated track car, that involved signficant re-wiring and some weight reduction. I got the new engine in and car running just a week before Zcon, and promptly put 500 break-in miles in a week; in the process I destroyed my front bumper which was why I showed up at Zcon with a new Nissan unpainted fugly-brown bumper :( I had to re-tune the car at the last minute, including several runs in rush hour Austin traffic Tuesday evening right, in order to make Zcon. MSR track day was the highlight since that was what I built the car for. However I have not run MSR in this direction before so it was basically a new track for me, the first 2 sessions was slow while I was learning the lines and how to handle the new car setup. This video was from the 3rd session when I finally started to feel comfortable on the track, though some of the lines and corner speeds still needs tweaking. This was also the session where Ahmed (PakiHomBoy) was riding with me: WARNING FILE IS 66MB
[ www.splparts.com/events/zcon06/zcon1.mpg ] I was running 15psi of base boost (controller turned off), the last minute tuning I had to do was not as refined as I like but the car still felt pretty good and is certainly more powerful than before. Car was running surprisingly cool, in the morning sessions water temps did not even exceed 160F, in the 3rd session when the sun was out it hit a peak of 170-180F. Oil temps were also excellent, peak of 200-210F. So luckily there were no major issues despite getting the car together at the last minute. Renee had asked me and Sean (sfarrah) to instruct at this event since we are all regulars at Driver's Edge events (running in the advanced group). It was my first time instructing but it went well, although in retrospect I wished I was just running in the regular groups so I could hang out more and run with other Zs. It was cool meeting some of you guys at Zcon, sorry I didn't have that much opportunity to talk to everyone. Looking forward to Florida next year!
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