Silverstone Trackday (Jul 10)

I had the opportunity to weigh the car last week. While visitig Oulton Park I sneaked onto the weigh bridge in the scrutineering bay. This is an old fashioned balance beam where you slide along the weights until it balances. A bit like weighing a sack of potatoes!

Anyway, even with rear seats, undertray, footwell sound proofing and air con all removed and Recaro PPs in place of standard seats, with half a tank of fuel she came out at 1315 Kg. A standard 964C2 is supposed to weigh 1350Kg without options. Many (including mine) weighed a good deal more because of options like aircon and heavy sports seats. So all in all I'm pretty happy with the lighter weight.

For the record my friend's 964RS (complete with roll cage and a more fuel) came out at 1265 Kg.

This week (Tuesday) it was time to go to the PCGB trackday at Silverstone. The day started with some sighting laps. It was dry at the time and they were the fastest sighting laps I've been on! In each case an instructor would drive one of the participants cars and lead a group of six cars around the track. Ours seemed to get a bit carried away as we had to get up to nearly 120 mph down the Hangar straight to keep up with him!. This meant that it was almost impossible to learn any of his lines!

By the time we were ready to go open pitlane the rain came down and the track was soon very slippery....especially since a few days earlier the Silverstone Classic cars had left plenty of oil and rubber on the track! This was an ideal time to go and learn the lines that were too difficult to spot on the sighting laps. Even on the part worn toyo R888s the car had pretty good grip but it would break traction at the rear when I was a bit too keen on the throttle. Good fun and loads of track space owing to not many others venturing out. Brother Pete was there in his 997C4S cab - the traction he had in the wet due to the 4WD was astonishing and I would say that there were few quicker cars out there in the rain.

By the time lunch came the track was drying fast. By the afternoon session it was completely dry and we all got lots of laps in and consequently went faster and faster. The speedo was brushing against the 130 mph mark at the end of the Hangar straight before I braked (always early) for Stowe corner. The concerns over brake shudder I had at Oulton, I'm pleased to say have gone since fitting the new discs and pads. I managed just under 150 track miles on the day, used hardly any oil and the car ran without a hitch :) .

A few pics from the day:









Here's a video of me chasing Pete's 997:



Here's a fun video of some other people's antics on track:



Video of the last session....GT3s are pretty common in this one



According to the video timings the best laps I did were something like 2' 40. In the dry I never get anywhere near the limit of the grip of the tyres but I'm still pretty pleased with the pace I went round:

Hand brake shoes and new discs (Jul 10)

The new brake package which had been delayed owing to Pagid brake pads being out of stock, finally arrived. First up were the rears which I had changed once before just after I got the car. However this time I decided to also change the handbrake shoes. These look like they have done all 170,000 miles and although they still had plenty of lining left, were now rock hard:



The new shoes are exactly the same as the ones that are now supplied for the boxster and 996:



They were a bit fiddly to remove and refit - the retaining springs have to be compressed and pulled out and then the shoes levered out of the star adjuster. Everything then falls apart and you really need an extra hand to put everything back in the correct order. I gave the wheel carriers a good going over with a wire brush before fitting the new shoes:



Old discs with the classic corrosion eating into the inner faces:



Shiney new disc fitted:



This was the first time I'd changed the front discs which should have been easier. This was true until I tried to pull them off and found them to be siezed on. A rubber mallet made no impression so I used the M8 bolt trick:



The picture above also shows how I support the caliper on an axle stand once I've removed it. Then. a couple of turns on the bolts and the discs popped off with remarkable ease:



The disc shields didn't look like they were going to last much longer. So these were duly removed. Hopefully they'll help the discs cool better and the other plus is that they've saved me some more weight.......a whole 700 grams for the pair!



On re-fitting the calipers I used new caliper bolts (I also put new ones on the rear):



A shiny new disc and new Pagid RS15 greys fitted:


The job was finished off by going out and bedding the pads/discs in - sharp braking from about 70 mph to 10 mph without locking up with a couple of minutes in between to let the brakes cool before doing the same again another 5 or 6 times. At the end of it I can confirm that the brakes are now back to their best.

Nb. For the rear brakes I used normal Pagid road pads. This turned out to be a mistake as you will find out later in this blog.