We’re back with our Brands Hatch race report where we’ve just competed in rounds 3 & 4 of the Time Attack Championship. The weather was blisteringly hot with track temperatures reaching up to 48 degrees! We caught up with Tegiwa Director, Luke Sedzikowski about how his weekend went.
Round 3
Warm up
We took the opportunity in this session to set up the car and calibrate the engine and mapping. We recently switched to E85 and saw some good results on the dyno, so we wanted to check its performance in a real-world environment. Tsuki completed the most laps in this session, which showed that we had good reliability in the scorching heat. Our best time of the session was 49.6.
Practice
I was given the all clear to push on during practice and went for the lap record. We managed it comfortably on lap 12 with a time of 48.3. This was a new lap record for the Pro class, a record that had stood for the past 10 years! Tsuki felt great at this pace and we were 2.5 seconds clear from 2nd place so didn’t need to push any harder.
Qualifying
The weather was getting hotter and hotter at this point. We knew we had the pace and did a 48.3 on lap 5 and then decided to park it as we still had a comfortable 1.5 second lead ahead of second place. The car had lost some grip from the earlier sessions but we attributed it to the change in track conditions. Therefore, we adjusted some roll bar and damper settings to settle the back of the car for better corner exit.
Final
Round 4
Warm Up
The NSX had gained a huge amount of understeer overnight, probably due to a change in track conditions. Therefore, we had to make some changes in this session. We did a banker lap of a 48.4 (0.1 off our lap record) and this was safe as we were 1.1 ahead of 2nd place. At the end of this session, we reduced our rear wing angle to help decrease rear grip and gain some front-end grip.
Practice
The changes we implemented worked wonders. The car felt amazing and we got back to our lap record pace of a 48.3. However, Alfie, the driver of the Ariel Atom, was getting quicker so we knew we’d have to push a little extra now. At this point, we were nursing a slight problem of a crack on our exhaust. This meant we were 0.2 bar down on boost, resulting in running about 490 horsepower for the rest of the day.
Qualifying
Bradley John, one of our competitors in the Pro class, managed to get his car working and put in a 48.3, matching our best time of the weekend. We had done a 48.1, so we were leading by two tenths but felt it wasn’t enough. We went for a push on lap 16 and achieved an amazing 47.7, completely demolishing our previous lap record set the day before. This put us fastest overall, five tenths ahead of Bradley. It was great news that Bradley had managed to sort his car, as we now had to push even harder, making the final race more exciting.
Final
Bradley managed a 48.017 on lap 3, so we had to go for it! However, the balance of the car had gone away from us since qualifying and the back of the car had lost grip. We put in a 48.013 putting us into 1st position by just 0.004 seconds. I then went straight for a pitstop to bleed the tyres down as we knew they had ballooned. We wanted to push for a low 47 which was on the cards. Unfortunately, Bradley’s car caught fire on the pit straight and the session was ended with an early red flag.
Overview
Tsuki performed incredibly throughout the duration of the weekend. We completed plenty of laps in the crazy heat and she didn’t falter. We managed to break the lap record twice, with only 1.2bar of boost at 490 horsepower. So now we can’t wait to crank things up in the hope that our lap times tumble even further. We’re super excited for the next round and can’t wait to see you there!
