This was an incredible experience. No amount of simulator (even a fairly realistic simulator) can prepare you for the assault on your sense.
As I approached the car the first thing that struck me was the rubber of the tires. It has about the feel of an eraser, perhaps a bit harder. However when it gets heated up it becomes sticky, actually picking up little stones and dirt of the tar, when you drive slowly in the pits. The cockpit is not very big, and there is no such thing as a seat, you sit on the carbon fibre of the safety cell. There are some cushions, but it has clearly been added as an afterthought. You push your feet down a narrow gully into the darkness, first getting it under the instrument panel, above a fire extinguisher. The pedals feel (you can see down there) about 5 cm wide, and are VERY close together. And it is not so much a sitting position, as a lying position, almost like sitting in the bath. The clutch pedal feels more like a tractor clutch than a car clutch, taking a significant amount of force for the first 3-5 cm of travel and then easing up. The brake pedal has significantly more travel than a normal car, what I mean with that, is the point that it starts braking, to the point of where there will be a full wheel lockup is a lot more than a road car. The throttle travel is very limited, but they did say that the cars are detuned for novices (us) and we only have 50% throttle available.
The revs build up extremely quick, and the cars are quick to accelerate once you have started rolling. Entering the first corner and braking, I was extremely surprised at how quickly the car de-accelerated, and how little the weight transfer made the nose dip. The suspension feels closer to a solid suspension, like a go-cart however if you get used to it, it is insane. Normally when you turn in sharply, the nose dips on the opposite side of the corner, and then you start to feel the g-force push you a bit to the side, with this race car, turning the steering wheel by 10 degrees at 100 km/h results in an immediate direction change and your body being flung to the side. The suspension is so hard that you would think it would start bouncing, but it is just before that level of bouncing and the wheels stay planted. Braking is beyond believe, the first time I started braking for the corner after the long back straight, I started applying braking, and applied more braking force and more braking force, the car stopped so quickly that I had to go another gear down, and accelerate to the corner. The gearbox was amazing, it takes a quick dab of the clutch and you pull or push the lever and that is it, off you go.
To single out a single thing that surprised me the most is difficult but it was probably the amount of movement of the front wing, at slow speeds it almost seems to bounce, and at high speed it looks like solid metal and hardly moves at all. The biggest challenge of this day, and learning to drive this car was not the physical, but the mental side of things. I did not get one braking point for a corner right, just because you don’t think a car can stop that quick, but you start braking for the corner, and you think you have left it way to late, and then the car starts slowing down, and you back of the brakes, because you are stopping too quickly. The amount of grip around the corners is astounding, going around Malmesbury corner in 4th gear at 5500 rpm takes a LOT of courage.
Found a new addiction, I think however that this will be more expensive, and it requires some planning and learning some new skills, like being able to fix my own race car. However I am hooked, and I will be owning a race car in the not too distant future
