Really well done guys. Great job, just finishing would be worth a huge party tonight. Would be a great challenge to do.

 

It was a good run. From the live timing the team came back quite strong after the transmission fix. I left when there was about 3 hours left in the race. Its unfortunate to hear that the car suffered an exhaust leak. I was thinking if it could keep pace with the Donut King GT-R the team would land within the top 30. Good job overall. Don't forget to share any data you have learned from the race as it relates to air and engine temps over the 12 hours.

 

That was an exciting race to watch! Its always a lot more entertaining when there are multiple classes racing at the same time. Congratulations to everyone involved for finishing the race! 12 hours of WOT on a turbo rotary is incredible!

 

Congrats to the entire team. Incredible effort. It was really fun to watch the live stream from here in the U.S. Would be nice if the feed had a streaming banner showing classes and position. Would be nice if SPEED covered more of this race. Love the track. Yes, post-race data would be VERY interesting once you have time to get some well-deserved rest!

So, curious to know, the previous years that FDs dominated this race, was it the I2 class that they won or a different class?

 

So very very cool. Great pics and videos and congratulations!!!!

 

Congratulations , despite the setbacks I think the car did Very well! awesome race to everyone involved . ( I'm looking forward to the next one)

 

The races in 93 and 94 up there were production based, the headline Class A FIA GT3 cars running now are way, way, beyond that.....probably best part of 25~30 seconds faster even with the hired guns back then driving. Can only imagine what a ***** of a thing it would be to remove a stinking hot exhaust and gearbox while lying on concrete!

 

The exhaust repair was done on the car; they just had to remove the heat shield. I say "they" because even though I was part of the team; I know that I'm a lousy mechanic although great with electronics and computers (well, not IT, but ECUs) so I just stayed out of the way and monitored the other cars in the class, the data and so on.

We did an initial repair of the exhaust, when AB was driving, and that took about 15 minutes. AB went out after that with the repaired exhaust and did pretty consistent times - 2'34s and so on. I think Ric went out after that and encountered the gearbox problem - the repair for that (swapping the box) took about an hour including rebleeding the clutch but they didn't seal up the hole around the shifter correctly. SB went out for a run and said it was really hot inside the cabin, but did his stint, and then Ric went out on high boost and we think he must have breathed in a lot of carbon monoxide or been hot from the hot exhaust (ie that there was still a leak) or both because when he came in he was terribly overheated and needed to go to the medics - he was right as rain after a little while though but I, for one, was very worried. After that they spent about an hour to reweld it properly, by which time we lost our 3rd place in class but we brought her home finishing 4th overall.

I keep saying "I think" because I don't have my big race spreadsheet in front of me right now and there was a lot of data I was processing, including fuel usage, safety cars, making sure the drivers all had their 1 hour break between each driving session and that each driver didn't do more than 4.5 hours total to comply with all the regs. Plus tracking tyre usage as well (how many laps each tyre did), planning pit stops... there's actually a lot to focus on! I worked out a spreadsheet with about 4 worksheets that all refer to eachother, plus there was checking the logged data from the car to keep an eye on drivers behaving themselves, coolant / air temps, air-fuel ratio on boost, and anything funny that drivers reported (which they didn't really).

Air temps were in the high 70s - low 80s (C), so about 175 °F. Coolant temps were in the mid 80s in the morning, but went up to a max of about 97 (206°F) when Ric was driving, on "high" boost (14 psi), and trying to get past other cars so he didn't have the full airflow. I saw the temps go up for a few laps and then they came back down again even though he was driving just as hard so I had to ask him what happened.

Also one of the drivers said he sometimes felt like not going to full throttle on corner exit because it's a scary track - but he knew that I'd be looking at the data so he was conscious to drive hard! So that's nice to know that I had some indirect performance benefit!

It was a real shame about the exhaust and the gearbox but to be honest we were trailblazers in some respects; Ric has run this very car in the 24-hour Nurburgring race but that was still with the standard gearbox and factory twin turbos so it was making a lot less power (and heat!) and we couldn't find anyone who had ran enduro races on a rotary to see what they needed to do with wastegates and so on to get them to be reliable (since rotaries have very high exhaust temps compared to piston engines).

I can say that our Turbosmart wastegate performed flawlessly! And we brought spares of all kinds of parts like ignition coils and so on and I even brought a whole spare ECU which was preprogrammed to the same map so we could swap it out if need be; not that we were expecting a problem but we just took spares of everything. When Ric was driving and had to come in from heat exhaustion, I found that the data logger was getting so hot that it was resetting sometimes and logging for only a short amount of time; so it must have been higher than their maximum operating temperature in the car. But the ECU just kept powering away which was good to see (I wasn't expecting problems but it's always nice to see things working as they should in real world extreme conditions rather than just in test facilities).

So yes, I can say it was much more rewarding than least year where we put it into a wall about 3 hours into the race when it was raining and we were still on slicks. Thanks for all your support people!

 

congrats! sounds like so much fun.

 

Congrats!!

 

 

Stuff back then was virtually stock, drive out of the shop and put on race spec brakes and tyres and go racing. Actually happened once with a Holden Dealer Team car I believe. Crashed that morning or day before, grabbbed a new one from local dealer and stuck stickers on and went racing. That could have been a few years earlier still though. People started getting sick of japanese cars dominating and it then became a homologation formula of holdens and fords.

 

I think that was in the early 90s, which was after the GTR era of 1991 - 1992 but before the start of the V8 Supercars series.

Cheers!

 

Here's my summary / newsletter for the event:

Adaptronic News

Cheers!

 

 

great video.

Never seen one of those daytona's outside of Gran Turismo. Was good to see.

 

Yeah, those Daytona Replica cars are made by a company founded by the same guy who founded a little company you might have heard of, called Motec

It's an LS7 engine, with individual throttle bodies, running the standard GM drive by wire motor though (so the standard motor drives the throttle bodies). They have a 6 speed Hollinger sequential box that does ignition cut on upshifts and they program the Motec M800 to blip the throttle on downshifts. I'd love to play with that sort of thing when I retire