Back home. Watkin's Glenn is such an awesome track to drive! Lightning was fun, but not thrilling, Summit was ok, just barely 'fun', almost not. Watkin's Glenn is soooo much better than both of those. Great rythmn, suits my car well, fast, lots of elevation changes, lots of cambered turns, etc... The HPDE2 group was very well behaved, and I spent a lot of the time we did get without cars around me. About the only 'encounter' story i have is from a Cobra replica that I caught in 2 laps after giving everyone a 20 second head start out of pit lane, then pulled through the pits again because of the train that the Cobra was on the tail end of, waited 10 seconds, set off again, and caught the Cobra again within a lap. I never got past him though, because he apparently had the attitude "no way this Miata is faster than I am!" Uphill out of the toe of the boot (turn 7) is the only place he was faster. I was faster in every turn, and could hang with him on the straight, in part because of my superior corner exit speed.
I got approved to request a check ride for DE3 (Advanced group) at my next event.
Car held up well. Saturday at 83F and 7.5psi on the FM2, I tripped my 205F coolant temp warning briefly. I bumped the warning light threshhold to 210F, and today, at 80F and 8.5psi, I only tripped it when following a similarly fast car. If they were much slower, I wouldn't be in the gas enough, and if they were faster, they weren't in front of me long enough to disrupt the airflow. I'll need to work on cooling more, some shrouding, a splitter, and/or AC delete would all likely work just fine. So they are probably all going in. The car has great low speed 3rd gear balance, maybe a touch of understeer, but all other high speed corners have too much understeer. Even a small splitter would work wonders, as I expected.
I went without a hard top so i could bring the track tires without risking a street-side puncture ruining my weekend, and that was easily killing my top end speed by ~7-10mph on the back straight before the bus stop.
I'm pondering an AC delete and re-mounting the radiator into a V mount, as there is about an inch to drop it down, and maybe 4-5 inches to move the top forward. New brackets would be needed, but would double the hood venting area I can use along with the benefits of any V mounting of the radiator.
Tires and brakes were great. The XS tires have tons of feedback and a nice howl regardless of the speed you are at the limit with, and they are incredibly consistent. There is no appreciable fall off or greasing up of the tires as I put heat into them, and I did plenty of that in back to back to back corners. Turn 5, 6, 7 along should be enough to overheat tires if they don't like heat. They did just fine every lap.
I got video of every session, and there are some pics from a photographer friend that I'll have up.