Re: RSP Time Attack CTSC NSX
Once again it has been an interesting weekend!
Friday morning I took the train from Amsterdam to Ede to pick up the NSX at Stickerdump. They were going to revamp the NSX with some fresh livery. I gave them 'carte blanche' so I had no idea what I could expect, especially in the little time they had. I was pretty excited. After two hours I finally arrived at Ede and went to their shop. The car was covered with camouflage, ready to be unveiled. When I took the blanket off the car I was stunned. The NSX looked awesome, like a real race car. After the car had been tuned and aligned I had not seen or driven it, so I was eager to take it for a spin and head home. Unfortunately it was raining pretty bad and with semi-slicks I had to be extra careful. The ride home went smooth, until I had to stop and suddenly the temperature went up. But as soon as I started driving it dropped again.
Saturday I had to go to work, but the splitter had to be mounted. Luckily my friend Shaffy came to the rescue and picked up my car and took it to his workshop to 'get his hands dirty'. And he didn't dissapoint. The splitter is not finished yet, we need to add a piece to fully cover the battery part, but it looks great.
My dad wanted to take his NSX out on the track as well, but he had some problem with the car. Tonny (from RSP) was already there to help him out. When we arrived at about 20:00 Tonny and my dad thought they found the problem, but where could we found NSX parts on Saturday night? We gave our Belgian NSX buddy Danny a call to see what he could do. He had what we needed, so we got in the car and went on our way to Belgium. We got back home at about 1:30 and started working on the car immediately. We started the car and... nothing... At this point there wasn't much we could do. Since his NSX wasn't going anywhere we decided to swap the cooling reservoir, maybe this would fix the cooling problems. By the time everything was done, it was 3:00 and we had to get up at 6:00, so it was time to get some sleep.
Sunday morning we headed to Zandvoort. The inspection went very smooth so we could start preparing the car for the training. I started the training relaxed. Warming up the car and the tires and getting used to the new settings. After one or two laps I came back in to have the tire pressure checked and saw my temperature going up again. When I drove out of the pitlane the temperature dropped. After another lap the temperature went up again, so back to the pits again. I parked the car in the box and we bled the cooling system. There was a lot of air in the system, this was probably the main reason the temperature fluctuated.
We got ready in time for the qualifications. I went out on the track again. I was still in my warm-up laps when suddenly the car spun. It happened very quickly and out of the blue. I lost a lot of coolant while bleeding the system, so maybe some coolant came on my tires. With a small burn-out I hoped to 'clean' my tires and went on my way again.
A couple of laps later I felt the back-end slipping away again, but I was able to catch it. For some reason the car was very tail happy, so the next corner I slowed down a bit but found myself looking at the wrong side of the track again. The temperature went up again and I saw a lot of steam coming from my engine. A bit dissapointed I headed back to the pits. My team immediately checked everything and came to the unfortunate conclusion that my head gasket was shot. There was no white smoke from my exhaust or oil in the coolant, so hopefully we are in time and there's not much damage.
Like I said, it has been an interesting weekend! We have much work to do before the next race.