blog.CarlRydquist.com: First practice session

Welcome

Hey, welcome to my official blog!

This is the place where you will find pics and updates directly from my race weekends, plus a lot of other fun stuff such as stunt driving or things not always about racing.

Cheers! /Carl

Pic of the week

Grid before the race, Nordschleife 2008.

Songs to check out

1. Foo Fighters - The Pretender
2. Span - Baby's Come Back
3. Adam Tensta - My Cool
4. Outkast - Take Off Your Cool
5. Alexandra Stan - Mr Saxobeat

Food and Drinks

1. Redondo Beach Brewing Co, CA
3. The Standard, Hollywood, CA
3. Nic's, Bevery Hills, CA
4. Vino Pasta, Gothenburg, SWE
5. Paradise Cove, Malibu, CA

Other things

Spot to be filled with useful content.

First practice session

Friday, June 8, 2007

So we are finally underway with the driving. We also still have our one car in one piece which is really not the situation for everyone - no less than 30 cars were involved in some sort of incident during this first two hour long practice! They either spun out, had mechanical failures or collided. Just insane...

Anyway, our run began with me going out to check the chassis balance on the GP track and then check that the suspension, bump stops, dampers, ride height and aerodynamics were correctly tuned for the Nordschleife part.

Ready to rock. I was really happy with my new earplugs from Bellman & Symphon, great clear sound over the CB-radio and they damp out the noise inside the car to a perfect level.

Overall, the balance was perfect on the GP track, which means it´s a little bit to oversteered for the Nordschleife, you couldn´t really go flat out on the fastest and most bumpy parts since the car was just a little too looose. This got worse when the tyres started to wear out, so the team is fixing some small things at this moment; we have some margins to work on the rear ride-height and sway-bars are easily adjusted.

Speed in the car was good otherwise, gearing is good, engine is really strong and the brakes are awesome. On my 2nd lap when I had checked the car was decent also on the Nordschleife I got a good start on my flying lap, passing among other Uwe Alzens brutal Porsche Cayman RS on the GP circuit. Unfortunately on this lap there were some cars that had suffered serious crashes on two different places, causing yellow flags and marshals were out on the track to tow the wrecks so we were like a queue of cars that had to go really really slow for some hundred meters and it just ruined any chance of a decent lap time.

When Ulf went out it only took half a lap before two cars collided and went into the barriers just in front of him, when they were all diving down Fuchsröhre at 200 km/h - he just slammed the brakes and luckily went through without a scratch..! Like expected he did a really solid job. Peter ran well as usual, no drama and good pace but he also had comments about oversteer. Martin was fast as usual, suffered traffic and yellows too and had even more problems with oversteer when rear tyres were really getting too hot. At the end he at least got a 9.46 putting us on 27th out of well over 220 cars.

A lot of cars in the pits, tonight we´ll try to be among the first 20 cars out on the track.

The teams with the best laptimes were the ones who could exit the pits first since they got clean runs in the first couple of laps, before all the incidents started occuring, so tonight we´ll try to do the same thing and get our car out into the pitlane as early as possible. Also at a late stage in tonight's session there might be less cars and incidents on the track that may give an opportunity to get a clean run, the car is a lot faster than it shows at this moment.

Ok, talk to you later.

Labels: Racing

posted by Carl Rydquist @ 2:28 PM

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