chuck911

Here's the thing. As nice as "this will definitely make me focus" sounds, the only thing that really works is spending serious time picking the brains of experienced drivers and spending as much time as possible learning from the best instructor you can find sitting right beside you. Preferably the whole time you are on the track. Ideally spending at least several minutes after each run reviewing the run, and at least a few minutes before each run planning your objectives for that session. You might for example decide to devote one full session to getting just one turn just right. Then drive the rest of the lap precisely on-line. Not fast, but rather thinking about that one turn. Until you got it down. Or even smaller, just try and nail your braking point as consistently late as possible. Not freeway off-ramp braking either but good hard threshold braking as late as possible. Which no one ever does. Because it is just too damn scary. Even though the brakes are the most powerful component on the car by a long shot, and if you are not using the most powerful component to its max you are leaving an awful lot on the table. But to learn that you have to be willing to sacrifice that turn, or your time, or "position", or whatever, to just getting the braking down. To learn the perfect line you have to sacrifice the perfect braking. Eventually you get to where you can put them all together. First though you have to get to where you even know what these are individually. These are the kinds of things a knowledgeable instructor would have had you doing. Drive with instructors like that a year or three and you will be shocked at your improvement.

The absolute least productive thing you can do is go out solo run after run trying to go faster. Almost everyone who tries that, they do feel like its working because they do at first go faster. What they usually don't realize is they fairly quickly hit a plateau that is way, way, waaaaaay below where it would be if they had set out to first eliminate the bad habits and learn the best techniques from the beginning. I myself am a perfectly normal case study in this. Began with habits I had no idea were so horrible, ate through tires, got faster at first then got stuck and blamed the car. Only when I made it a point to always go out with an instructor- and the best one I could find- only then did things start to click and improve. Not that it was easy. Its a whole lot easier to throw money at the car. It does however actually work. Like nothing else.

jsknowlton

I am realizing that you are right and fortunately I have a few good Instructors and opportunity to get on track with them fairly easily here in Houston. Thanks for the advise.

Valvefloat991

You do have a TPMS system that will conveniently provide warm tire pressures. When I tracked my 991.2 C2, I found that tire pressures rose 8-10 psi from cold. Based on that, your pressures were probably on the high side.

drcollie

Thank you for playing....if you want to adjust tire pressures at the track, you have to get one of these and learn how to use it. Anything else is just conjecture and internet folklore.

chuck911

Pyrometer, cool. One day at the track there was this startup company offering corner balancing and alignment. They had this cool rig set up to do it right there. Wanted to do a regular thing at PCA events, offered to use my car as an example. So next run, pulled right in nice and hot, wasn't even out of the car they were all over it. Okay well, right side hotter than left side, counterclockwise track, same temp outside middle inside across each tire. Which they were looking to do something to show people but now nothing to do, kind of a letdown. For them.

Now the interesting thing about this, to me anyway, my car was never really set up for the track. Its a driver. That I track. And autocross. But its a daily. So it is set up with that in mind. To get, among other things, as even tire wear as possible on all my sets of tires. Which it does. And yet here we are at the track, way out on one extreme of the spectrum and lo and behold, nice even temps. Reflecting nice even wear. So wear and temps, they go hand in hand. The pyrometer (which I never used before) will get you there faster than waiting for wear, but either way you are going to wind up in the same place.

Also interesting, that was way less camber than almost all the guys going for the track setup, following all the camber wisdom advice.... and constantly complaining about wear, and handling, messing around trying to get the temps even.

Go figure.