I did the local car club Mana Rd hill climb yesterday. My first hill climb. What a mad day.
After the Taupo track day, I was cursing my gearbox (syncro's going), and after this event, I've added the lack of LSD to the list of things to curse at.
I can't remember how long the course is, but it takes me about 1 min 40 seconds to run it.
The Top guys do it about 20 sec faster than me (they run race prepped evo's with anti-lag).
I ended up last in my group by a bit under 2 seconds to a 350Z. I'm in with all the turbo rear wheel drives, and cars with a displacement of greater than 3000cc rwd. There is this insane twin turbo V8 ford capri. I think it came third overall.
Im still running road tyres, where everyone else is running race tires (still DOT approved). I think its time to get some myself.
We did one slow drive over the course to familiarizes ourselves with it (everyone at once), followed by a non-timed (which they ended up timing) run to get familiarized with it at speed. In the end, because of problems with the timing gear, this runs time was used as well.
It rained most of the day which was very nerve wracking when trying to pull up for some of the corners (steep cliffs everywhere).
Our first official timed run, the rain had stopped a little before hand, and the road was mostly dry, so the fastest laps were set then, but it was raining for the next two runs. I was very glad I rain-x'ed my window the night before.
I think my times were 1.47.xx on the practice, 1.40.xx on the first run (dry), 1.44.xx on the second run (wet), and i didn't get the third run's time.
On the LSD side of things (or lack of), when exiting some of the sharper corners and trying to accelerate away, one tire would start spinning, getting me to my rev limit pretty fast. I was constantly having to back off, wait for that wheel to gain traction again before I could accelerate hard again. When the run was done we would carry on down the road a little, turn round and wait on the side of the road for everyone in our group to finish. This was a problem for me as one wheel on the tarmac and one in the grass/mud, led me to be going nowhere fast when it came time to leave.
From just above idle, the wheel on the grass would start to spin, and I would be going nowhere because none of the power was being transfered to the wheel on the tarmac.
Time for a new 93+ gearbox I think.