Driver Journal // June 2025

I know that June isn't over yet, so it seems a little early to write a journal entry. But June is looking like it will be a pretty light month for driving, as well as coaching for me. There are some Calabogie HPDE days coming up at the end of this week, but I have yet to be notified of my involvement, and since they are during the week I am not holding my breath. The next few weeks I have some parts to replace/install on the car, so I'll be writing up more maintenance stuff. I did get some track time during the OTA School on May 31st at the Canadian Tire Motorsports Park GP track and figured I would reflect on that.

The Grand Prix track at Canada's home of motorsport is a special track for a few reasons. Many people know it as the second fastest race track in North America (the first being Watkin's Glen.) This makes it the single fastest track that I've been on in my BRZ. But the GP track doesn't just make me acutely aware of my lack of horsepower, but it's also the only track on the calendar which can severely punish you for making what you might think is a small mistake. See my last post about OTA Event 2. This track is one that demands respect and attention at all times, and is one that I can confidently say that I need more seat time on it. At the last OTA school, I was able to do that, and managed to collect a bit of data to use as a baseline.

The Lap

For those of you who just want to look at the lap, here it is.

First, let's get the driver excuses out of the way. It was cold, very cold. It was also wet. I had camped at the track the night before and a rain storm had woke me up by caving in the walls of my tent. The track did dry up throughout the day, but my lack of sleep tried up my talent pool relatively quickly so I limited myself to my first 3 sessions and then called it a day. All that being said, I set my personal best lap time at that track that day. The lap time I had before was from an OTA event in 2023 where I was able to set a 1:45.6. On May 31st I set a 1:43.9.

The Car

While this is a driver improvement post, I want to briefly comment on the car. In 2023 I was running Michelin Pilot Sport 4S tires with the stock alignment on the BRZ. The Michelins are a fantastic tires, but they are a 300 UTG tire at the end of the day. (Or 350, I can't remember.) The well used A052s I had on thes car this time, while used, are a more track focused tire providing more grip in the corners. They are also 40 milometers wider than the Michelins I ran. In addition to my stickier rubber, I also now have a slightly more aggressive alignment. So there is something to be said about the car having a decent bit more grip than in 2023.

The Driver

To be fully transparent, I had been horribly anxious about this weekend for days, if not weeks leading up to it. I would have preferred to get the car out on a slower track to shake it down since this was it's first time out since the engine was rebuilt. Unfortunately the car had other plans at the first OTA school, and my day was cut short. I went in to this day with my confidence level on the asphalt, and anxiety in the sky.

In my first session, I did not record data or video. I simply wanted to get out there and drive on the track. I drove the car as thought I were my own student, and rhymed off the reference points I'd been practising in iRacing prior. Needless to say, I had a blast. By the end of it I was laughing and "yeehawing" down the big hills. The next few sessions I did, I picked up speed, and slowly built back up my confidence in the car, and more importantly myself.

The Data

Above are the 3 sessions I did where I collected data. The numbering system on the Racebox Website for some reason isn't helpful, but the numbers in the centre left are the time of day. My confidence peaked in my third sessions (middle session above) where I set my personal best lap at the the track so far.

If I take a closer look at the session, I can pick apart the min and max speeds per corner. I can also see corner G-force, acceleration G-Force (lul) and my sector times. This is all very interesting, but unfortunately I don't have any prior data to compare it to. I would be able to identify areas of improvement by comparing min and max speeds, sector times etc. But since I only have the one day of data, I'm left more or less sitting on my hands.

At least I would be, if not for the wonderful motorsports community and their support. I was able to acquire the data from Ontario Time Attack Director, Giuliano, who has a similarly (but not exactly like mine) built Scion FRS.

RaceBox, annoyingly, won't allow you to upload files to it's built in data viewer. So in order to compare the two laps, I took to a third party data viewing called Circuit Tools. After uploading both mine and my competition's files, I was met with this screen.

Now, I don't want to go through every little nuance of the data here because I could easily ramble on and on about that. But I do want to dissect the main problem area that I can see by looking at this comparison.

This section shows my best lap, my theoretical best lap, and Giuliano's best lap at the bottom. The different numbers with the + sign next to them are the delta, separated by sector. Circuit Tools splits this track in to 5 sectors, which is helpful for data validity, but a bit strange since I'm pretty sure the track only has 3 defined sectors.

What we can see by looking at the data above is that in sectors 1 through 3, the delta between me and the faster car is less than a second in sector 1, and less than half a second in sectors 2 and 3. Now, I'm not saying that these differences are negligible, because they aren't. What I will say though, is that they are nowhere near the size of the deltas in sectors 4 and 5. It should also be noted that those two sector deltas are not purple, which means despite this being my fastest lap, I had done those sectors faster on another lap. We won't bother with that though because the difference in sector 4 is negligible.

So what does all this mean? It means that I can potentially pick up more than 3 seconds in the last two sectors. This would drop me down in the 1:40 range, which is more than competitive for an OTA event*.

Okay, but how am I going to do that? How will I know what I'm doing wrong, and what I need to do to find that time? Well Circuit Tools won't tell us exactly that, but it will give us a good idea. We can take a look at the right side of the window, which will show both cars min and max speeds, as well as the delta at any given point on the track.

The first thing that sticks out to me is the very obvious bump where the green lap (Giuliano) is at it's highest point above the red lap (little ol' me.)

If I click on it, it will show me where on the track that is, which is the entry to turn 5.

This was unsurprising for me because I had been taking it very easy in to corner, considering it is the biggest braking zone at this track. If you've been keeping up with my posts about my maintenance adventures, you'll know that I recently had to do a helicoil repair on one of my calipers. Knowing that, and also knowing that I was running a fresh set of street pads, I was very careful about putting myself in to a position where the brakes were working too hard. Again, I need to build up my confidence in my build again, turn 4 in to 5 at this track is a high confidence area, which leads me to my next point. From the top of the hill, all the way down to the braking zone for turn 5 should be foot to the floor, wide open throttle. I was not doing this.

Confidence. Seconds to gain just by building up my confidence.

Something else I noticed was the weird blip in the red delta line in Circuit Tools. This happens in the same corner, turn 5a through 5b.

What this looks like is me briefly gaining on Giuliano by quite a bit, but then steadily losing that time again, and then some. When I first looked at it, I actually wrote it off as some kind of data inconsistency, but as I'm writing this, I realized it's definitely not that. The delta goes from a 2.92 second gap, to a 1.54 second gap, suggesting that i gained 1.5 seconds in turn 5. You might think this is a good thing, but what I think is actually happening is that I'm somehow carrying too much speed through turn 5, despite over-slowing the car for turn 4. This is causing me to have to wait for the car to rotate, and get on the gas again way later than the other car. The result of this is the gap climbing to almost 4 seconds by the end of the long straight.

The aha! moment

So what can I conclude from this? Well, in an attempt to not overwhelm myself with 100 things to do better at my next session at the GP track, I have narrowed it down to 2 key takeaways.

1. I need to build confidence in myself, and in my car. The only way to do this is to get back out there. Not just at this specific track, but any track, or road, or parking lot. I need to get out there and rebuild my relationship with my car, so I can trust it, and trust myself again.
2. I really, really suck at turn 5. The OTA school is returning to GP in august, and provided I am assigned a student, I'll have another chance at this track. (GP can be hard to get on otherwise. It's also expensive.) My goal for my GP track day in August is to nail turn 5.

As for the goals I set in my last journal entry, I haven't really had the chance to get out there and do them. I'm still working on regaining my confidence, and GP doesn't really have any slow sections to practice.

The conditions also had me scared to turn traction control off. But I did put it in track mode. Does that count?

Cat tax?