After doing stage 1 some months back, I went back to learn stage 2. I definitely got better with downshifting the 2nd day once I figured out that my foot was too wide and I was pushing brake and gas a the same time, preventing downshifts from happening. This was fixed by turning the brake pedal two turns towards me.
Here are some of notes of what I learned those 2 days:
faster upshift (barely get off throttle)
faster and harder transition from gas to brakes (same end pressure, faster transition)
Do not brake and gas, this prevent shifting
passing: When you are side to side but not quite for a turn, you must release the brake to win the corner since you cannot stop any more. If someone is trying to pass on the outside, you brake even more to leave them room to be side by side with you. The inside guy gets the apex no matter what, even if not wheel to wheel
And notes relative to actual turns:
carry speed into 2, do not brake so much and gas back up, just keep speed going up
lift before turning 3a, start turn and put a bit of gas more gradually (do not remove gas)
4 brake early enough not to understeer
5 flat out
6 good brake on top but not so hard, light brake, coast, and early gas half way down
7 brake 3rd cone, good brake pressure
8 go faster and turn later so that I can connect 8a
9a get on the brakes faster, be a bit faster turning the wheel from 9a to 9b, scandinavian flick
10 flat out, shift before turn in 10 so that I'm not as sluggish in the turn
The 2nd day in the morning, I got a flat on one of my tires without knowing, which made the car very oversteery and before I knew it, I spun in the chicane and got to see why:
This time we were running the full course and had slicks on the cars, so it was a good difference from level 1.
We only had 4 people in our group, and one was close to a professional racer, so I didn't get too close to him. As a result our end times on the 2nd day were the following: our teacher Nico had a benchmark time of 1:38, our next best driver was at 1:41, I got down to 1:43, and the 2 other students with less experience were around 1:48.
After driving, we compared our data acquisition to see what we were doing wrong or could improve:
My last 2 sessions the 2nd day in the afternoon, my times were reasonably stable and in the down direction :)
One before last session: 1:48, 1:48, 1:47, 1:48, 1:45, 1:48, 1:46, 1:46, 1:46, 1:46, 1:47, 1:46, 1:48
Last session (with video offset): 1:45 ( 0:37), 1:45 ( 2:22), 1:46 ( 4:08), 1:45 ( 5:53), 1:45 ( 7:38), 1:44 ( 9:22), 1:48 (11:06), 1:44 (12:50), 1:44 (14:34), 1:44 (16:18), 1:44 (18:01), 1:43 (19:44), 1:44 (21:28), 1:44 (23:12),
Here is a vid of my last session
And for novelty purposes, a shaky video from google glass of an ealier session:
On the way out, I got to watch Dorifto wednesday. That was quite fun to witness ;)
