After pretty much a year (!) of work I was finally able to properly test out the V2 Great Danton. Although I did race at Imola middle of the year I had so many problems that it didn’t really count. The purpose of the day was to make sure everything ran ok and maybe have a look at how the performance has improved since last time out.

The best lap last time was a 1:27.8 and I was giving it all I could, and I also managed to run for over a 1.5 hours.

This would also be the first time that I trailer the car to the track, having previously always driven it there. Despite the difficulty in loading the car due to the awkward steep hill and access to the garage, it was great to have the trailer. No worries about the reliability of the car or any eventualities and I for once had company on the drive down. The Ambassador served me well pulling the Nissan smoothly and somewhat effortlessly.

I ran the car without the front splitter as it had caused me some problems at Imola and didn’t have time to fix them. Additionally it would have made it a lot more difficult to load the car on the trailer so I need to figure a quick way of mounting and dismounting it.

Overall the car is obviously much faster now, but with that comes a bit of extra caution and less tendency to be aggressive, which I will have to get over if I really want to extract the full potential. With it being just a testing day, and the brakes were a bit spongy, I wasn’t pushing too hard as I got used to power.
Unfortunately my day got cut a little short due to loosening turbo bolts, which then caused the gasket to fail before I could tighten everything down again. The main issue here that the guy who prepared the car decided to not remount the safety washers on the turbo, but also this stems from a bad and not very well supported exhaust which I need to fix over the winter. It has been a major pain for quite a while now. So after just 30 minutes of driving I had posted a new best lap of 1:26.2.

For sure this is far from optimal as the turbo had some major lag due to the leak and was only boosting to about 1.1 tops, and I had a passenger. I would get on the power and nothing would happen for a few seconds. I hope once everything is sorted and with the splitter I can aim for a good 1:22. The ultimate target will be to break 1:20 barrier, but this will take time.

One of the reasons why I had the phone strapped to the dashboard was for the lap timing and telemetry using the RaceChrono app for Android. It’s really great tool to have as it gives you split times and lap delta, and records everything from a session. One of the best reasons to have an Android phone.

A few shots of the day:

There are a few things to do over the winter and then early next year I’ll try and come back to Franciacorta for another go at a PB.