Hey guys and gals, figured I would post up here about my first time on the track in my SA and my thoughts on the old car's performance. I'll start out by saying that the bulk of my experience on track is between many hours of seat time with Gran Turismo 5 and my home made racing cockpit with Logitech G25 wheel, and one track day on a small course in Dunnville, Ontario in a previous low powered, low grip DD.

The track I went out on was the driver development track at Canadian Tire Motorsports Park (previously Mosport International Raceway). This track is at the driving school and is meant to be a low speed but very technical track made to teach drivers how to properly race. Overall I am happy with the way my 79 RX-7 performed against some much newer cars.

The car is pretty much all stock besides the RB header, custom 2" exhaust with magnaflow mufflers, K&N drop in air filter, emission removal and a small selection of other improvements that really don't have much effect on power. I was running cheap stock sized all season tires on stock suspension. Brakes are the original drums in the rear and stock disks with Hawk HPS pads up front. I give the Hawk pads a lot of praise for managing to keep brake fade away the whole time I was there, being on track for 9 laps at one point. I would highly recommend these pads to anyone.

My fastest lap on the track was a 1:25.2xx which I felt was fairly quick for a first timer with a total of about 35 laps at this track. To give you an idea of this speed, a Mazda 3 was only 1 second quicker and there was a BMW 328is running a meer 2 seconds quicker (I suspect the driver of the BMW was very new or the car had problems). The slippery all season tires were actually quite forgiving and gave decent feedback, but liked to understeer quite a bit and were prone to oversteer easily with throttle lift mid corner. Made for some fun and interesting moments near the start of the day when I was still learning both the track and the car. I definitely still need a lot of practice to improve my driving and another 40-50 laps on the track would have gone a long way to dropping my time further. I realize my hands are a little too active on the steering wheel and on at least 2 corners I could have carried much more speed and prevented an unnecessary downshift.

The only problems experienced throughout the day were overheating of the front wheel hubs, which started to push a bit of grease out of the right hub and created a smoke trail for one lap before I pulled off the track to investigate, and some slight fuel starvation around the double apex off camber turn near the middle of the track. I'll let the video do the speaking at this point, but I had a blast out there.

 

awesome! must have been a blast.

 

Nice to see an old gal get a chance to kick up her heels.

 

It always nice to see an SA get out there and mix it up with the new stuff. Probably surprised
few folks with it.

 

cool! looks like fun

 

It was a ton of fun. I don't know if the car surprised anybody really, but she sure surprised me. I knonw a few people were impressed with the car in general, how clean it was and whatnot. Most people thought the car was from the southern states, not Ottawa, Ontario where it originally came from.

I think the only thing that might have surprised some is the flames that the car was generating on decel. I had a couple people come up to me after my 3rd session on the track and tell me they had to double take the car since it was apparently shooting pretty good flames. I think my idle mixture is a little rich, but I didn't think it was rich enough to be firing out flames on decel, especially with the dashpot still in place. Its too bad the video from outside the car was the shortest run out there. No flames since I don't think the exhaust had enough time to really heat up.