Marc's Public Blog - Cars

It was a nice flight to TH and back, except for the weather being pretty freaking hot in Willows and causing some of my checklist plastic covers to half melt :)

Thunderhill itself wasn't great unfortunately, while it was pretty hot there, my car ran fine: no overheating issues, Ferrari definitely did cooling right.
My brakes unfortunately didn't fare as well, in the end I had to pack after three sessions and after having totally cooked my rotors and calipers (and boiled the brake fluid, which means your brakes pretty much stop working, and that's slightly undesirable when you're doing over 120mph and a turn is coming :)
I got some good help at the track, including from a nice coworker called Arnaud,but in the end, there wasn't that much to do, so I ended up flying home early.

After that, my car spent 4 days straight at Silicon Valley Auto Group where they fixed the alignment, changed the tires, cleaned up the abused calipers, tried to get all the brake pads to fit (Cobalt GT) and when it was all set and done and I got the car back, I finally got a callback from a Ferrari track specialist who told me that I should avoid those pads since they damage the rotors and tend to overheat.
Great, I had just spent a lot of time and money to try and get them in. Yet, it was good to know this just before the next track day, and I got an emergency change of the Cobalt GTs with Pagids I had on hand literally 2 hours before my car left for the next track day (and they turned out to make the overheating issues go away)
I also found out that my calipers cooked so much that they melted their dust shields and were supposed to be rebuilt except there no time for that before the next track day. I guess I'll find out then if things work, or not.
All in all, this track day was a bit frustrating, but also a learning experience.
A few more pictures are here