So you may or may not have realized by now we put the Z down in June for the LS3 swap. My team over at Enjuku Racing gave the car 110% of their efforts to get her ready in time for my next race on the schedule: GRIDLIFE South at Road Atlanta. Of course there were setbacks, and many late nights in the shop along with a 6 hour drive at 1am to get the car on the Dyno and tuned at Horsepower Logic on Thursday morning. Running on 2 hours of sleep, I pushed myself to get back up to Enjuku by 8am to get on the road and to the track to tech the car at 8pm. My co-driver (aka life saver) took the long stint and got us to Atlanta. Apparently I fell asleep for a whopping 15 minutes... but we made it.
With all the changes we made to the car while she was down, we decided it was best to approach this event as a shakedown, and take things easy. Seeing as I had never piloted a car with more than 280whp on a racetrack, I was a bit anxious to explore the new powerplant.
First day on track, Friday, I qualified 11th overall which we were pretty happy with considering the conservative nature of our plans for the race weekend. More importantly, the new motor performed flawlessly and kept surprising cool all day despite the 105 degree weather.
I felt much more comfortable with the car heading into Saturday's morning sessions, however we ran into an issue with the brakes, that set my confidence back quite a bit. I pushed myself to drive through the inconsistency and lack of response while my team and I attempted to diagnose the issue on Saturday. Unfortunately, we were unable to determine the root of the issue that day. Saturday night we decided to try re-bleeding the system, and hoped for improvement on Sunday.
Come Sunday, the motor continued to perform like a champ. Generally, the car felt great. Unfortunately, we were not successful in rectifying the braking issue, as it became apparent it would require some attention when we returned home from the track. Since our primary focus of the weekend was seat time and braking in the new set up, we decided to dial it back and continue to drive as aggressively as the brakes would allow.
Not that we were particularly concerned with our standings against the competition, we were still pleased to end up 9th in class and 20th over all out of over 70 cars. Considering that we had zero issue with the motor, trans, diff, or drive train all weekend, we left feeling as though it was a rather great success!
