Thanks Bricks. I didn't want to be presumptuous but am hoping Master sees my post.
nsx878, all good points. I'll take a closer look once I get it on the lift. I tore my shoulder up a few weeks ago, so garage time has been nil. I'm a month into the winter hiatus and already antsy for spring. Ha.
For perspective, I've been tracking my heavily modified 930 for seven years or so. It's light, has quick turn in, ridiculous brakes, and a tall but whomping power band. This makes for a fun, tricky car that requires management of momentum and high revs through the corners so the big turbo can come on quickly. No power steering, little brake assist and heavy clutch mean you're pretty wiped after a run.
It's taken me a bit to get used to the drastically different NSX, and I'm definitely still learning. It rained all day the first time at the track, but that turned out quite fun feeling out the balance of the car and the nannies under very slick conditions. Hard braking and acceleration were not on the agenda that day.
Over the next few visits I started to feel progressively more confident in how the car behaves, which is very consistent. It pretty much does exactly what you tell it to do. The turn in isn't super quick, but I suspect a lot of that is the stock Conti tires. More on those later. You feel the weight under braking, but surprisingly not at all in the corners. I never feel like I'm hanging on through a corner. I often find myself trail braking or saving the last downshift for the turn in point to get the rear to rotate a bit. I would never do that with the 930, I have to be done with braking before the turn or it gets all crossed up. I've lost the rear on the NSX a couple of times, but it's not dramatic, the car rights itself even in track mode. It's slow when that happens though, as it seems to rely more on cutting engine power instead of using the torque vectoring and/or brake drag to straighten out.
By my last day of the season, I finally felt like I could confidently push the car harder and harder each lap. I don't claim for a minute to be a racer that can hop in anything and be fast right away, and the combination of hybrid and AWD has taken me awhile to adjust to. You can get on the gas really early and take very different lines through corners, but that felt unnatural for quite some time and I couldn't talk my brain into ignoring my instincts. I shaved off almost two seconds a lap (1.9 mile track) that day and it was freezing cold on tires near the end of life, which made grip pretty tricky. The time gains were 100% from earlier throttle and playing with different lines.
The stock Conti tires are not great. They don't seem to have a sweet spot that I could find. The tend to swing from too cold and hard to overheating and greasy. The left rear takes most of the pressure at Blackhawk Farms due to it being clockwise and having a long sweeping right hander, and on my last day it was starting to come apart at the outside shoulder. I just bought a set of PS4, so I'm stoked to try those out.
I think Acura's choice of using solid face rotors was a miss. They do not have great cooling and even discolor a lot during a session. I've never noticed any fade, but our max session time is 20 minutes. I suspect much more than that and they would start to overheat. This has me thinking about just getting slotted rotors and new pads for track days and keep my current ones for day to day. They probably have 20,000 street miles left on them. I generally only get to one event a month and I have a lift, so swapping back and forth doesn't phase me. Life's big decisions.... LOL
Overall I think it's a great track car. It jumps off the corners and braking is consistent and stable. It could use more HP from the ICE. The acceleration softens a lot over 100. It will be interesting to see what top speed is at RA. I think the fastest two mile recorded has been in the high 180s, so even down the back straight I don't think it can get anywhere near 180. I doubt I'll have the guts to keep my foot in it through the kink either.
Hope you get a chance to hit a track sometime. What's around Colorado?
I have a bunch of gopro videos on youtube if you want to see what the track I go to most looks like.
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCr-x9WpPkI3U3AUJH2IVKKw/videos
