hehe let's file this latest installment under Analysis, but really, we should put it in the crying-in-my-spilled-milk folder.....
I hate to be the guy blaming the hardware, buuuuut.......I gotta blame the hardware on this one.......
On Friday, I was driving with Speed District at Buttonwillow 13CW, and I exited Sweeper 0.5 seconds faster than my fastest 1:48.07 lap from February. I was on a 1:47.6 pace with less than 3000 feet left. I exited Sweeper, started heading up the Esses in 3rd gear, shifted to 4th----and the DCT double upshifted to 5th. Argh! The acceleration was killed off. I battled the car back into 4th gear and kept going as quick as I could, but it was a mess. In all that stupidness, I lost about 0.6 seconds. The lap ended up as a 1:48.3. Up until that shift, I was on the fastest single lap of my life.
I took a screenshot from the AIM software to illustrate the mess. In the picture below, the lap in question is colored Red. For comparison, I included 5 other laps, colored Black. Some of the laps were done on slower tires just to illustrate how lame this moment was. The AIM software cursor is set at the exit of Sweeper at 11100 feet down the track.
The reference lap in this picture is a 1:48.07. The first thing to note is the Yellow circle in the bottom right corner. You can see that where the cursor is, the Red lap is 0.499 seconds faster than the 1:48.07. So, it would be fair to say that I am on a 1:47.58 at this point.
The next thing to look at is the small Yellow circle in the middle of the picture. This chart shows the gear that the car is in. To the left of the yellow circle, you can see that ALL laps are in 3rd gear as I finish Sweeper. Then at slightly different times on all the laps in the Yellow circle, I shift to 4th gear. But then on the Red lap, you can see the DCT shifts again to 5th gear. ARGH! It does this on it's own sometimes. I am QUITE certain that I am not pulling the shifter twice. You just never know when it will happen. It is quite maddening. So then you see I try to get it back into 4th, and then I finally go up to 5th.
The last thing to look at is how the speed was affected. The large Yellow oval at the top of the picture shows the comparison of the speeds going up the Esses. You can see that at the moment of the double upshift, the speed line flattens out and doesn't keep up at all with any of the other lines----even the speed profiles of 1:50 and 1:53 laps on slower tires......
This lap was the second 1:48 lap in a row, so the car had been under a fair amount of stress already. The DCT double upshifted earlier in this same lap while exiting Off-Ramp. I was able to get it back into 3rd gear quickly. I definitely lost a little time there too, but not like after Sweeper. I am finding that when I push the car very hard for a couple laps in a row, I get some unpredictability in the gear shifts. I don't know whether to blame the VF tune on the supercharger, or blame the GTS-DCT software......whatever it is, it's damned annoying. Does this happen to anyone else?
I actually really enjoyed the afternoon time with Speed District on Friday. They went to an Open Track format (with point-by required) at 3PM and I ran a ton of laps (on slower tires). I think I stayed out there for almost 40 minutes during one of my open track sessions. I don't think I've ever stayed out there that long before. The weather made it possible for the engine to keep going, so I stayed out there. I learned quite a few things by doing so many laps at one time. I like how you get into a flow lap after lap. This is the one thing that bums me out about my car---it's really good for a couple hot laps and that's it. Sometimes I wish I had a car that could do 10 full-on hot laps in a row at any air temp.