Finished running in the car today on the way to Cadwell, then spent the day sprinting. First competitive appearance by a GR86 in the UK? And it was an auto
You get the track to yourself in a sprint race, so it's quite a good technical test of the car, no need to worry about running into anyone else. For me, whether or not the car was good depended a little bit on your point of view.
What I like in a track car is the chassis balance, the feel of the tyres on the road, so that you can maximise the corner and straight-line speeds by being careful with the controls. I really enjoyed the handling of the 86 today, took a few laps to get confident with the new car, but the vsc is really well tuned so you can lose grip but not end up in the wall or get many tenths scrubbed off your lap time.
It was 10 degrees, overcast and dry, so the performance of the PS4s would be ok, not going to get them hot but not stone cold either. I was trying the launches and it turns out that if you put your feet on both pedals, it spins up the rears. So you need left foot on the brake, start to press the accelerator and then let go of the brake. Even so, if you turn off the traction control so that the engine doesn't bog down, it wheel-spins for 20m or so. I like that
Because the start line had a little camber, you ended up leaving it sideways.
The course had tyre and cone chicanes on the straights today for a bit of variety, but I thought the car felt very agile and nipped through those pretty well.
I tried letting the car select gears on the first run with sport mode, but preferred to use the paddles after that. I thought the shifts were good, but as we suspected, it's a little conservative on the downshifts and won't shift until the revs will land around 5000 or lower.
Where some people might be a little disappointed is with the engine. The claim is that the response of the n/a engine is good, and it sort-of is because the throttle map is silly responsive. It would be a little easier to control if it was more progressive. And unfortunately, the engine doesn't really deliver on the promise of that initial response, for me. Pulls ok to the redline but it's just good rather than great.
The supercharged engine in my old Yaris GRMN really made the car special, only 210bhp but the tune was so good. You could pootle around town and then boot it to get all the power at once, with no modes, all one map.
Sales of the GT86 were not thought to be that great, and I think the reason for that is that most potential customers are more concerned about the engine than the chassis. Hence me saying whether or not you think the car is good on track depends on whether you are an engine or chassis person. On a track day, you are going to get lapped by a lot of stuff out there, but if you don't care about the lap time and want to enjoy the handling, then for me it's superb.
I had a good battle all day with a competitor running a lightly-tuned manual GT86. He had PS4 tyres on the stock 17s and intake/headers with a remap from Fensport. The two cars were quite close, straight line and cornering speeds would probably be pretty similar. But we were solidly towards the lower end of the leaderboard, a Mclaren 720S winning our 2l+ n/a class
The results are here:
http://www.vola-racing.com/msportspro/javelintrackdays/
Check the Ranking tab, final order is based on all the lap times added together. Many competitors were running quite modified cars and most were on semi-slicks, so bear that in mind when looking at the times. I might be able to run semi-slicks at the next round.
Off the track, I drove seven hours today to get to Cadwell and back. Car was great on the motorway, Subaru Eyesight is a modern miracle, even worked very well in the dark
Android auto maps on my Moto G10 phone disconnected a couple of times, but I rebooted and it was fine afterwards.
TL;DR Think I'll keep the car
fortunately I was in the CEOs C-HR but wouldn‘t fancy it in a manual of any description
