I went to Eagles Canyon for the Maverick PCA two-day HPDE (High Performance Drivers Education) event expecting to work on three corners and came home with a Yellow wristband and a 2:16.55. The lap that did it came Sunday morning, solo, in a Blue session, before an instructor got in the car that day.

Here’s the part I’ll admit up front: I’d been driving the first sector well and the second half like a man waiting for something to happen. The data says so, and now there’s video of it.

The numbers

Seven sessions, forty-nine timed laps. Best lap per session, in order:

• Saturday 08:22 — 2:18.33 (with Christoph)
• Saturday 10:31 — 2:19.85 (with Christoph)
• Saturday 13:40 — 2:19.89
• Saturday 15:45 — 2:17.77
• Sunday 09:29 (solo) — 2:16.55
• Sunday 11:42 (with Christoph) — 2:18.18
• Sunday 14:00 (checkout with Mark) — 2:17.42

Median lap went from 2:21.91 Saturday morning to 2:18.77 Sunday morning. Theoretical best from the weekend’s quickest segments is 2:13.72, so there’s 2.8 seconds sitting there in pieces I’ve already driven.

The three corners I came to fix

I’m in Blue Solo, but I asked for an instructor anyway, because T1–T2, the 3-4-5 complex and T14 had been costing me all season and I was tired of guessing. I got Christoph, who is excellent.

The 3-4-5 complex was the clean win. I’d been coasting through it, which I knew, and Christoph got me to stop treating it as three corners and start treating it as one long climb with a throttle application in the middle. Minimum speed at the T3 apex barely changed, 43.5 to 43.6 mph. What changed was coasting in that zone: 3.7 seconds a lap Saturday morning, 1.7 seconds by Sunday afternoon. The two quickest runs through the complex all weekend both came after his ride.

T14 he let me experiment with, and it looked like a disaster for one session. My apex speeds scattered from 38.0 to 47.6 mph and I threw away most of the session. Then in the checkout I posted the best T14 of the weekend: trail-braking at 1.3 g with 0.19 seconds between brake release and apex, against 0.97 seconds on Saturday morning. That’s the whole HPDE bargain. You spend a session being slower on purpose and collect later.

What the video showed that the data couldn’t

I had the GoPro synced to RaceChrono for the fast lap, and I’ve put it on YouTube.

Watch the delta box. At the T1 apex I’m 0.20 up on my reference lap. By the crest at 56 seconds I’m 1.28 up. I finish 0.74 up. I built the entire lap in the first 56 seconds and gave back more than half a second in the remaining eighty.

Two things the camera caught that the telemetry never would have:

I’m not using the apex curbs. At T1, 54 mph and 1.1 g, there is a car’s width of unused track between my right front and the red-and-white. Same at the fast right at 85 mph. That’s why I’d been holding the brake release so long into T1. I wasn’t being timid on the pedal, I was apexing early and then rescuing the exit. The release was the symptom.

The PDK can’t make up its mind. At the crest I’m at 46 mph and 3,671 rpm, in third. At T14, also 46 mph, I’m at 5,059 in second. Across all 56 laps, four corners come up in a different gear depending on the day: the crest, the corner at the 1,000-metre mark, and two others. Same corner, same speed, different gear.

I checked whether it costs time. It doesn’t, or not measurably. Exit segment times split 8.58 versus 8.62 seconds one way and 9.16 versus 9.04 the other, both inside the noise. So I’m not going to tell you second gear is worth a tenth. I am going to say that a car arriving at the same corner in a different gear on consecutive laps gives you a different throttle response each time, and that’s one variable too many when the traffic gets faster.

Traffic, or why “I was never passed” isn’t a compliment

I passed a lot of cars and was only passed a handful of times all weekend. It sounds better than it was. Twenty of forty-nine timed laps were compromised by traffic, and Saturday’s 10:31 session lost five of seven. On one lap my back-straight peak fell to 105.7 mph against 123.2 on a clear lap.

The tell isn’t pace, it’s exit speed. My front-straight peak only went from 107.8 to 110.6 mph across the weekend while the back straight sat at 120 to 123. Arrive at the main passing zone three miles an hour short and you spend an extra lap behind every car you catch.

The checkout

Mark rode for three laps: 2:21.46 and 2:23.80 with him aboard. I dropped him at grid and ran 2:17.42 alone a few laps later.

What he signed off on wasn’t pace. With a passenger I braked 20 metres earlier at the end of the back straight and carried an extra second of coast to the apex, and still hit the same minimum speeds. That’s margin, and margin is the Yellow criterion. Going quickly with nobody watching is the part I already had.

The tires deserve a mention too. 29 cold, 34 hot on the A052s held 1.00 to 1.10 g of lateral load from lap 2 to lap 9 in every session, including Sunday afternoon with coolant peaking at 112 °C. No fall-off, no greasy final third. I’ll test a pound less at the rear next time with a pyrometer to back it up, but I’m not going to pretend the setup was the problem.

Homework

Three things before the next event, in order of what they’re worth:

1. Use the apex curbs at T1 and the fast right. Get the right front to the paint and the long brake release fixes itself.
2. Stop coasting on the climb. Eight to ten seconds a lap on neither pedal between the fast right and the crest, every single session, with and without an instructor. My best time through that section is still the one I set on Saturday morning, cold, on my second run group of the weekend.
3. Take the PDK off auto at the four corners where it’s guessing. Pick the gear, take it on the paddle, remove the variable.

Then we drove it home. That’s still the best part of owning a GTS 4.0 instead of something with a trailer hitch attached to it: 394 naturally aspirated horsepower and a set of A052s with a weekend on them.