Time Attack Festival at Mantorp Park
The new King of Mantorp!
Last week saw the biggest event of the year for time-attack, the Time Attack Festival and King of Mantorp event in Sweden. The lineup for this years event was the best ever seen with 17 entries for the fastest Unlimited class, among those 17 was some of Europes fastest Time-attack teams including the King of Mantorp 2014 and 2016 European champion Valtonen Motorsport leading the Finnish teams assult, also featured was SMR Porschen that hold the tintop record for 4 years until it was broken by us at the last TANU round.
In between TANU Round 3 and the Time Attack Festival the car saw an upgrade package being launched including new bigger D2 front brake discs following the overheating issues seen at Rd3, new front knuckles with lower weight and further adjusted geometry. The rake angle and overall ride height was changed as well as some minor aero updates. Also a late decision was made to scrap the current boost control strategy that had seen issues all the way from round 1 and never worked to ouor satisfaction. The new boost control Strategy/setup and wastegate settings where implemented on friday/saturday before the race and the car loaded and shipped of to Mantorp.
Sunday – Race day
The warmup was used to fine tune the new boost control at a lower boost setting, after a few visits to the pitlane it was all working fine. For Q1 the boost level was increased to normal setting and some fine tuning was done also here. It was now time for Q2 (3 qualifying rounds in total and then the top 5 would advance to a superlap final deciding the winner). In Q2 the goal was to set 2 quick laps and then do some fine adjustment for Q3 where the record attempt would take place. Due to some incidents on track a full lap on attack could not be completed but at least it was enough to get a feel for the setup.
Coming in to Q3 the boost was raised to the “lap-record” setting new tires where fitted and the car left the pitlane for a 1 lap shootout for a new record. The lap was put down and coming to the line the clock showed 1:13.4 a new lap record by 0.15 se and by far the quickest time of the day so far. However the goal was to go sub 1:13 and the car was much quicker this time around then at Rd3 when the 1:13.5 record was put down. When reviewing the logs from the lap compared with the old record it was obvious that the extreme headwinds down the long Mantorp straight was the cause, the top speed had decreased by 25km/h and almost a second was lost over the straight alone.
Time for the superlap final. At the courtesy of being quickest in qualifying we were the last car to go out on track. Due to a runoff in the lower class before the Unlimited class the finals were running late and the 2 warm up laps where shortened to only 1, also the headwind was still super bad although slightly better than in Q3.
The lap was started and by the first sector the delta showed -0,1 sec. Coming to the end of the long straight the headwind was obviously less and the delta showed -0.4 sec. Coming to the braking after the long straight the wind gusts had been causing issues all day with some big aero instabilities during braking so some margin was left for the hard braking zone not to risk throwing the overall victory away. Entering the final sector the delta showed a estimated laptime of -0.35 sec (1:13.2) when coming up to the line the timing showed a laptime of 1:12.6 crushing our own record by 0.9 sec after a mega last sector. The time also meant we won the overall event by almost a 2 second margin.
The feeling after the final was great, this was the first event when the car performed 100% without any issues all day, also the boost control was now working perfect and the upgrade package launched before the event did what was intended. All in all a perfect race day (disregarding the windy conditions).
It´s now two races left this season and we dare to promise two more lap records if the weather is on our side.
Frederik is running Konig Hypergrams in 18×9.5 et 25mm all around in Matte Grey. The Konig Hypergram is Flow Formed.
