blog.CarlRydquist.com: 24H: Friday, second qualifying

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Grid before the race, Nordschleife 2008.

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24H: Friday, second qualifying

Friday, May 22, 2009

Photo: J. Shin.
I was doing the qualifying, and as mentioned before, there is only one shot to get it right before the track is full of cars from slower classes.

We had made some changes to the car compared to the first practice, but obviously since it rained on Thursday night it was difficult to know how good they were for dry conditions.

The team had the car out early on the qualifying grid. Pretty predictable the most hectic part of qualifying was the formation lap when everyone battled on cold or semi-cold tires, to be the first around the GP-lap, before entering the Coca Cola turn around the pits that leads out to the main straight again (this is how a timed lap at the 24H is started - so that we don't have to do a full lap on the Nordschleife to start a timed lap). My Hankook tires were great during the formation lap and I had a pretty good position to hit the Nordschleife.

With the setup changes I couldn't really push 100% on the Nordschleife (the GP track is very easy with wide margins comparably), but still had to go for it pretty hard in the fast sections and hope that the car would swallow any bumps and be balanced enough to stay on the track. Still lacked grip in low speed turns but the car was definitely alright compared to before on the bumpier parts.

Photo: J. Shin.

Some car caught fire after Schwedenkreuz and I was both lucky and unlucky to be the 3rd car behind. The first one went off on the oil, the second car sneaked by. As car number 3 behind that broken car I wanted to sneak by as well but the first Porsche that went off was aggressively working his way back onto track and I had to hold back. Good thing I did since he came flying in over the kerbs diagonally over the whole width of the track (it's not too wide) - I would have had him in my door if I had followed through behind car number 2. The logger showed 3.0 seconds lost in this section compared to a later lap.

The rest of the lap was undramatic and I came in with a 9.16, decent and a good bit closer to the fastest in our class last year. I knew though that there was still a lot to be found since I had lost a lot to the cars I followed in smooth low speed turns and in the high speed sections the car was just not as good as it could be.

I did two more laps directly following the first one just to see how grip developed. Early in my third lap I started getting oversteer in 200+ km/h turns. Back to pits to adjust the setup.

As long as there is time, there is a chance to improve the setup. Photo: J. Shin

We adjusted aero and did more work on the alignment and suspension. Looking at the data logger from a couple more test laps we first had the 3.0 second accident avoidance I mentioned above to knock off for a comparison, and we could also pick several sections on the track where I had major improvements with much higher highspeed cornering speeds.

After the final analysis of the overall lateral G we discussed with the Hankook representatives about what margins we had on the tire wear and decided to do a good bump up on the negative camber all around the car.

Our grid position became 32, just like our car number. 8th in class and 13th looking at SP6, SP7, SP8 for a reference to our position last year, means it was the team's best qualifying result so far at the Nürburgring Nordschleife (the FIA GT class SP9 GT3 that was added for this year saw several very fast cars merging in between all SP6-SP8 teams, as well as clinching pole - Ford GT SP9 GT3 - ahead of three time winner Manthey Racing's Porsche 997 RSR. Interesting and racing star-studded field to say the least.

Labels: 24H, Hankook, Racing

posted by Carl Rydquist @ 11:34 PM

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