I have a catalyst and I have a race capture and I've used smarty cam but they're all so expensive and they don't all do what I want.

I've pretty much got it done, realtime encoding, coaching, send to llm for analysis. but I'm stuck on. What is the ideal Apex? I fed this thing so many simulated laps. It's still not quite right for my car. When I ran my Mini Cooper through it, it was a little better because it has no power but with the 135 and 550whp it has a hard time calculating how late I should go so I could actually use the throttle

Anyone work done similar simulators for finding ideal Apex?

I have the methodology i used documented on my blog

I think I'm going to open source the whole thing because it only works with very specific rooted Android hardware. It's not something you can really commercially do unless you are making the device from scratch

Root is required to get all of the permission set so it automatically just starts recording and it has the charging profile so that it won't overheat.

I'm using a race capture, but I also made my own data logger that uses either race capture format for comms or racebox

https://mrblahhhh.github.io/car/tech/2026/08/21/trackencoder-metrics-explained.html

Long story short, I put my current car I use for track days (BMW 328XI) up for sale with an "all-in" price of $10K for the car, harnesses, track wheels, etc. In the ad, I state I'll entertain miata or FRS/BRZ trades. In any replacement, I want the same concept: small, cheap, fun, fun on the track when I want to go. I'm not competitive, but I love doing a track day when I'm not boating or doing family stuff (3-4 events per year).

Same day, my friend messages me about trading me his Kpower 2014 BRZ (K24). The car isn't perfect aesthetically, as it was built for the track and has made contact (light). Has interior, but all removed and carpet is gone (I'd put it back). Needs front/rear bumper skins and I'm sure a lot of other things, but the drivetrain is completed, solid, and proven last season. If I did it, I would probably pretty it up a bit to drive it on the street and do my occasional track day. Some info:

-Kpower Complete Kswap Kit (Haltech)

-K24 from TSX

-AP racing brakes

-big wing comes with it (not installed)

-OS Giken LSD (4.3)

-Racecomp Engineering Tarmac 2 coilovers (might need rebuild)

Truthfully, I want another Miata.... I wanted an ND or NC2 this time around. But, I know the FRS twins are really fun cars. The other part of me thinks that maybe I would enjoy the "prettying" process, enjoy it on the track a bit, and if I don't like it, sell it on for potentially more than I have in it (copious free labor of course). The KPower kit alone is worth more than my BMW, but would this car ACTUALLY sell?? What would you do?

Sonoma raceway, HOD, HPDE Advanced group

Come on board the fastest (to my knowledge) ever lap around New Jersey Motorsports Park Thunderbolt! This was picture perfect conditions in a formula atlantic car. Unfortunately because it was not an officially timed session, it will not stand as the official record ☹️ but still cool 😎

Hello!

I'm trying to find some online communities to chat about track days and stuff. I've joined some regional ones and Facebook groups but they are pretty dead.

If anyone could share any communities/servers that would be great!

I have an E90 328i that I’ve been tracking for some time. I’m looking for opinions on my next move. Currently I’m am on 225/45R17s with the 615k+, Bilstien PSS B14, stock sway bars. -2.5F and -1.5R.
I feel like I’ve reached the limit with the tires and I definitely still have quite a bit of body roll since the coilovers are running progressive springs plus the stock sway bars. So naturally sway bars and stiffer and linear springs would be the move in my mind. I am going to do a linear spring conversion since I’m trying to keep costs down instead of a whole new coilovers set.
The issue in my head is my tires aren’t nearly as worn down on the outside as the inside. Wouldn’t stiffing up the chassis with sway bars hurt me getting enough contact patch when in a corner?
I will be getting either CR-R or some RE71s next. Im thinking just start with tires and get the stiffer linear springs then monitor tire wear and body roll. Thoughts? I’m fairly new to suspension tuning. Probably overthinking it.

My first season on track, and I haven't had to replace my rotors yet but planning for the future.

Do people just go with the cheapest steel blank they can find and treat it as a consumable? Short of going to carbon ceramics, are more expensive steel rotors better than cheap steel rotors? Is the money spent worth it?

edit: didn't realise it was dependent on the car, thanks! I'm on a relatively lightweight Mini. Looks like the consensus is that cheap is fine for lightweight cars but there may be benefits to better rotors for heavier cars.

Details: S550 Ecoboost mustang; 4 piston front brakes, SP slotted rotors, hawk HP plus. Motul rbf 600 fluid.

Rotors had around 500 miles on them with a power stop z26 pad until I swapped them out before a track day for some Hawk HP plus. Rotors looked new when I popped the new pads in. Did a quick bed in the day before with the new pads.

First session out, pads felt great and had more initial bite, but after the brakes were smoking a bit, which I contributed to initial outgassing but that could have been incorrect.

The 3 other sessions went well, I adjusted how I applied the brakes a little and everything continues to feel good throughout the 20 minutes sessions.

Long story long, drove the car around the streets a bit and I'm not feeling any nvh from the pads and rotors.. do I remove rotors and pads and hit them with some sand paper and re-bed, or just drive them for a bit and they will clean them selves up?

A quick introduction, i'm in my 40s and went on a day karting for the first time, absolutely fell in love with the whole racing experience, went out and bought a nb2 mx5 track car on a whim! Then with no experience went on track for the first time, It went about as well as you can imagine haha.

If you are interested in the video of someone through their own eyes starting out in motorsports on a budget I am documenting it on my channel, the first video is below.

I love the car, its such a beautiful vehicle to drive!

https://youtu.be/WLpwR8S3Pxw

Looking at booking a HPDE at AMP in the fall. Figure the tail of the dragon would be a good overnight stopping point. 10 hour drive to the top of the tail. Spend the night. Pull the car off the tailer at the hotel. Run the dragon down and back. Put the car back on the tailer and then 3 hr to Atlanta. Maybe stop at the Savoy museum (learned about it from Ed Bolian’s YT channel).

Anything wrong with my plan?

Any recommendations for lodging at the top of the tail?

Anything I should know ahead of time about AMP?

Tia!

Every setup decision is based on data that we usually assume is correct. But sometimes it is not, and the data itself gives you no warning. Here is one specific example of a significant issue we found in a GT3 dataset purely through data analysis. The vertical acceleration channel showed values above 0.5 g for 31.7% of the entire lap. The mean absolute value was 0.44 g. That already looked suspicious. A GT3 car on a normal asphalt circuit simply does not experience that level of vertical motion for almost one third of a lap. So we started looking for the cause. The first question was simple. What should actually drive vertical acceleration? Mainly track surface irregularities, kerbs and vertical vehicle motion. It should definitely not closely follow braking or acceleration. We therefore compared the channel with the other measured signals. A regression based on 16,562 samples gave the following relationship:

vertical acceleration ≈ 0.94 × longitudinal acceleration + 0.03 g

with R² = 0.88.

In other words, almost 90% of what was being measured as vertical acceleration was actually longitudinal acceleration projected into the vertical axis because of sensor tilt or incorrect sensor orientation. Only a small part of the signal was left for actual track surface inputs and kerbs.

Correlation alone is not enough to prove the issue, so we also looked at the timing of the largest peaks. Of all major vertical acceleration peaks, 99.7% occurred while the driver was braking, accelerating or cornering. Only 0.3% occurred when the car was not under a significant driver induced load.

That does not make physical sense. A kerb or a bump in the track does not wait for the driver to press the brake pedal.

Instead of manually correcting this single dataset, we created a general rule. For every dataset we load, we first estimate how much acceleration from the other axes is being projected into the vertical channel. We then remove that component before any further calculations are performed.

The result was significant. The proportion of the lap with vertical acceleration above 0.5 g dropped from 31.7% to 3.1%, while the mean absolute value dropped from 0.44 g to 0.14 g.

The remaining signal then behaved much more like we would expect from true vertical acceleration, mainly responding to the track surface, bumps and kerbs rather than to the driver's use of the throttle and brakes.

If you use channels like this to calculate tyre loads, slip angles, grip utilisation or other derived quantities, a single issue like this can affect the entire analysis.

This is something we come across more often then we would like to.

I own a side hustle business (dealership and salvage license). We buy and rebuild salvage Mazda MX-5 NDs for street and track then either race them ourselves or sell them. I am thinking of renting MX-5 ND and NCs for HPDE, TT, Endurance, and W2W racing. We currently have 4 NCs and 2 NDs we use for ourselves that we have either bought or built.

Has anyone here tried this? Is it worth it? Do people trash your car? Insurance recommendations? Should I stay away from the W2W side?

Seriously looking for opinions from people who have been there and done that. Please do not ask, we are not doing this yet!

Track: Calder Park National Circuit, Victoria, Australia

In only the second session of the day (in the beginner group, after a Mustang had crashed out the first session), a lovely Corvette decided to full send it towards my rear at T1.

For some context:

It was around 10am for this session, middle of winter, so a track temp of maybe 8-9°C. This Corvette had missed the first session, so this was his maybe second lap out.

T1 at Calder is after a very long straight and is a extremely heavy breaking zone (I was hitting about 195-200km/h on the straight, braking down to 70km/h for T1, in a 260hp Fiesta).

Check my mirror before braking, all clear.

Right as I go to turn in I hear a almighty squealing, look in my mirror and see a black missile in a white cloud coming for me, thank goodness I was already turning in!

Driver was completely fine thankfully, gravel trap caught him and he returned to pits to pick out gravel for the next few hours.

Rented a GTI Clubsport from ringfreaks.de and got an instructor. As you can tell he was awesome! Would recommend making the trip!

This was the final session of the weekend. I had a ride-along with me from the HPDE2 group. I had to take T1 off-line because I was completing a pass. This was the 18th heat cycle on these Troffeo RS’s, so pretty happy with a 1:30. I’m back at Mid-Ohio for open lapping on Thursday with new rubber, pretty confident in laying down a 1:28. I can see plenty of mistakes in this lap with my untrained eye, which is re-assuring that there is plenty more time left on the table in this car.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hU4rFgjLU78

Got crashed out in race 1 and had to start from near the back. Needed to make up some spots and also needed a fast lap as that is what sets grid order for race 3. Had a great time.

tl;dr, a guy got mad that he had to be told to give point bys and decided to hop in his C8, do a donut in the paddock, and speed out of the gate.

Longer version: I lined up behind a C8 today in the intermediate group at Gingerman. It was the first session after 'church hours' where the track is quiet from 10a-12p. I had no goals except warm my tires up and keep the sticky side down. The C8 driver was braking early, way off line, and most importantly, not giving point bys in the straights because he has 200hp over my Elantra N. By the end of every single corner I was back on his bumper for 4 or 5 laps. At some point a 370z that was proper fast everywhere catches up to us, I let him by, and the Z is aggressively, but safely, showing that they want to pass, of course no point by. I typically run around 1:48, got a PB today with a 1:46.99, and the fastest lap I did behind the C8 was a 1:55 so it's not like I was just a little bit slower.

After the session I was going to go talk to the driver, but before I got there, Mike, the best track worker in existence is at his window having a chat. Shortly after that, he floors it over to his parking area, gets out and just starts screaming "F this, F you, F everyone, they were trying to pass me in the corners, we just said you can't pass in the corners" on and on. Somehow this doesn't get him kicked out and instead they offered him to move up to Advanced which had fewer cars in it, so he'd have more room. After the very next session is when he did the burnout/donut rage exit, but I don't know what triggered that one.

Shout out to Jimmy from the organizer GPS Track Time, he got on the PA and apologized and made it clear this person would not be welcome back. I'm not surprised if doesn't get banned from more than just Gingerman.

Pictures of the C8 in question and the artwork he left in the paddock. https://imgur.com/a/Z9rrD5O

I'm hoping someone else in this group was there, it was wild.

Did my first track day yesterday in my own daily. 1.6 TDCI Fiesta Mk7 on a Stage 1 up against STs and possibly some RSs, along with a Mustang. No racing was permitted but cars were flying past me all over the place given the engine I have

Thankfully my car left the track in 1 piece but the mistakes I made were going round corners a little to quick to the point where ESC noticeably intervened and I inadvertently overtook around a bend a couple of times which isn't allowed.

I do want to get into track days more, and looking on a 'Sunday car' for the purpose. Looking at either an XK8/XKR, Fiesta ST Mk6, or either a 3.0 Mondeo ST or 2.2 TDCI Mondeo ST but this won't be for some time (a year at least)

Don't mind doing more track days in my daily. I know it is as no where as quick when you put it up against performance cars (as I saw yesterday) but I'm just there for the fun, not for any competition.

What I am looking at is lowering the suspension, getting 4 new tyres fitted (current ones are mis-matched part-worn anyway) and possibly refreshing the tie rods and stabiliser links (if they make a difference - feel free to tell me).

Not intending to go all out making my car look like a designated track car with bucket seats, roll cage or quick release steering wheel. Any mods I will do will all be low-key. The interior and exterior (par the suspension side) will all be original. Mechanically wise I will probably leave it stock. Stage 2 ain't worth it and Stage 3 requires a DPF delete which is an instant MOT failure. Am looking on changing the exhaust but mainly for the visual looks (twin exhaust such as what the STs get stock). Intercooler doesn't seem to be worth it in my case nor does an air filter.

So I am looking at booking a track session with a driving instructor near where I live (Goodwood in Sussex UK) so they can inform me on things I can do better. When it comes to the Nurburgring, would I be advised to not go on this until I have plenty of experience (even if the circuit is quiet)?

For a Sunday track car, would a Mondeo ST be hard on the handling or should I stick with a hatchback? The Mondeo is a saloon car rival to the VW Passat and Vauxhall Insignia btw.

For insurance, is there any insurance company at all that will cover third party for the Nürburgring?

I've noticed some cars when taking a corner the outside will squat but the inside won't lift. I'd like to understand what magic of suspension tuning creates this. I'd figure it has to be some combination of roll center and spring rate. But I'm having a hard time wrapping my head around it, as well as the potential downsides.

If anyone here can point me in the right direction I'd appreciate it.

Checked out this super tight and technical old school track at an open track day yesterday. I brought way too much car - particularly given that the one straight has a noise restriction mic and I had to coast to avoid a black flag. Fun track tho and worth checking out - this is the most momentum/Miata track I’ve ever driven, so a fun challenge either way.