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Took my Aston Martin to the track

2K views 2 replies 3 participants last post by  XHILR8N! 
#1 ·
I decided to go to my Lotus Club track day on friday at Portland International Raceway and put the key in the lotus... click, click, click. Darn, guess I get to try out the Aston Martin, so loaded all my gear into the AM and took off!
I had just put on new tires. Yokohama Neova something or others. Same tread wear as the 050A's but seemed/felt stickier.
I had a lot of looks in the car, even though there were many cars worth more than mine, I had at least 5 people say they had never seen an Aston Martin on the track and that I had some big balls to drive such a beautiful car so hard. I am one of those people that will drive ANY nice/fast car I get on the track. I have friends that own multiple ferrari's and lambo's and a Mclaren yet they won't take any on the track because they are to scared, not me.
Ok so how did it do.
Grip: More than I expected, maybe its because I am such an experienced driver maybe it was the car/tire combo, but either way I was going a bit faster than Porsche 911's and modified BRZ's in the corners, but I was in the intermediate group since i had never driven this car on the track and i am an instructor so I was probably pushing harder than many other drivers. Not saying the car overall has more grip, just surprised it had that much grip for being so heavy.
Power: Pretty good but still needs more. Had a hard time breaking the tires loose even with TC off, which means it needs more power. I did get about 7 MPH better on the straights in this car than in my Lotus.
Brakes: This car does have them right? I mean it doesn't really stop, especially after 3 laps my brakes would go bye bye and I almost had to use run offs a number of times because they faded. No fade in the pedal, it was still strong(had better fluid put in) but just no stopping. They certainly overheated because after my first session after getting used to the car I came in and the brakes were smoking and you could feel the heat from them from about 4-5' away so I took it around the parking lot to cool them down. The rest of the day I would do 3 hard laps, get aways ahead of everybody and then do a cool down lap while the other cars caught back up and then I would take off and run a few more hard laps.
Here is a video of my best recorded session a 1:34.14 with TC on. I turned it off to get a little more power coming out of the corners that it was being "allegedly" used and was able to get down to a 1:33.14 and I probably still have another .5-1 second I could drop with a wide open track since my phone battery didn't last to the end of the day when the track warmed up and I really felt comfortable pushing the car.



Some pictures, still waiting on the CD of the day so I have the actual photos with no watermark


 
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#3 ·
Way to go! Thanks for the report.

Did you hear any James Bond music in your head?
 
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