I had my first track outing with my new Atom 4 today and I have to say I am one happy camper. The car is so fast, the ZZR tyres that are rubbish on the road come into their own on the track when they started to melt.
This was also my first time at Snetterton even though it's my local track! can't believe I have never been here before, it has plenty of space so if you make mistakes (for the most part) you will likely not get punished.
2.17 was my best, to be honest I thought I could do better than this, so a little disappointed, not with the car, more driver skill and knowledge of the circuit, it's a little tricky and the Atom requires a certain driving skill. I had some driver tuition and if you have never done this it is recommended. I found Jeff at MSV brilliant. He will tell you the fastest lines of the circuit - given he has been doing this since 1997 I think he said he is in a good place to do so. He helped me with braking, I told him I think I could brake later than I was, he helped me with that on track in the car with hand gestures. There are some corners like Coram, in that you need to be in the middle of the road then cut to the right right before murrays 90 degree left hander is the fastest line. Then Riches off the main straight you can lose a lot of time here if you hit the first apex, your mind tells you do you you shouldn't, instead you take a wide line and it the last apex. It's little things like this. I need to get back there for more seat time. Jeff helped me with lines as well and not just for Snetterton this will help with all other circuits.
Temps wise, shockingly I was at 104c max temp. It was a very hot day today though (27c).
Tyre pressures I was at 16 psi front and 19 psi rear. I went out for sighting laps, got back, then went out for a 15-20 min session - not too hard just learning the track. When I got back to the pits I checked my tyre pressures and the front was 20 psi and rear around 25/25 psi. So of course I corrected this but shows what ambient temperature can do.
After every run I did a spanner check. I (for whatever reason check the wheel lug nuts, because it is something you can't see if they move). A couple of them did undue slightly, so I had my torque wrench with me (Atom 4 has 19mm lug nuts), and tightened them up to 100Nm.
Fuel wise I burnt though about 80 litres of the good stuff. I still don't know how many laps I did, but will look though the logging to see. But it was about 1 litre a lap. I actually ran out of fuel, so next time I will take more.
I will put together some video of this, although my main GoPro ran out of battery very quickly, I am not sure why, will investigate this. I have some other GoPro video but it's not great as it's from an original GoPro v1 device.
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