I drove over Monday night for a Premier Inn, good call really as the M62 was treacherous in the dark and I really wouldn't have fancied it at 5-6 am.
Weather was only ever going to be minging for this trackday, but I did have hopes of spending some time on a wet track to learn a bit more about the car at lower speeds. Minging was an understatement though and Oulton just turned into an ice rink, at least on ZZR tyres. Traction actually felt pretty good and the car was stable at full throttle on the straights but under braking and initial turn-in there was just nothing there. Had all four tyres locked up regularly into the back chicane and turning in at anything over a snails pace just rotated the car.
I don't want to make too many "bad workman blames his tools" type comments but this is the first time I've really looked on at the S3 V6 Exiges with a real jealousy powered lust. It could be that every V6 in attendance just had a really handy driver, but it seemed like they could handle the conditions SO much better. I later learned that the particularly quick ones (including a gorgeous 420 Cup) were shod in Avon full wets, not to take anything away from the driver(s) skill and commitment but it really did give a good impression of the full wet tyres.
Mid morning I got a phone call from home, baby wasn't feeling too good and had a fever ramping up so I did the honourable thing and used it as the least emasculating way to chicken out of doing any more laps and went home instead
As a result, I've barely got any pictures and no video to share - so pretty much a write-off of a day.
The Motorway drive home was really not pleasant, to be fair to the ZZRs they didn't chuck me off the road or anything like that - but I know and understand their limits and the M62 was really struggling for drainage. It gave me a couple of hours to think about options, I think it's about time I got sorted with a set of all-weather tyres so that any similar days in the future aren't a total waste.
I don't expect to be breaking wet-lap records, but something that just feels a bit safer under braking and turn-in would be nice. The car today was rotating at ease on turn-in, quite unsettling at any real speed. I still love ZZRs and will be keeping them for most summer usage, but on days like today with nigh 100% chance of rain from 8 till 5 - I need some alternatives.
In other news, I did break something on the car. I noticed when driving from the hotel this morning that the idle was really struggling and it stalled a couple of times on me. On the way home I was playing with my BT app and noticed my AFR reading was flatlining at full-lean. Checking my logs at home it looks like the wideband sensor died sometime on the 25th and since then it has only reported a full-lean AFR of 25.5. The ECU is programmed to try and correct fuelling based on the wideband up to a maximum correction of 10% either way, so as the sensor is reading full lean the car has effectively been overfuelling by 10% under some conditions which I'm guessing was causing the idle issues.
I've raised this with RRR, they're going to send the logs off to ECUMaster to see if there were any clues as to the nature of the failure but also they commented that the Bosch 4.9 sensors are not particularly resilient compared to the 4.2's with as slightly lower resolution. In parallel I spoke to a friend who does a lot of tuning work and he said exactly the same, he doesn't fit 4.9's for any customers due to their failure rate. More on this later when I know more, we'll see what ECUMaster says... incidentally a friend of mine has an S3 Elise Cup with a Bosch 4.9 and that failed recently too.
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