Sandown Raceway Track Day - Mazda MX-5

April sees a return to Sandown Raceway in Victoria, Australia. If you’re interested in reading a corner by corner rundown of Sandown please see my previous post on this track in the link below:

Arriving at the track early in the morning revealed a perfect day for racing after a forecast for potential showers. This was a relief to say the least as Sandown is known for the close proximity of its perimeter walls to the track as you’ll be able to see in my video. With the weather, a set of new stickier tyres and some more track experience under my belt I was looking forward to pushing much harder compared to my last outing at Sandown.

Overall, I smashed by PB by approximately 4 seconds achieving at time of 1:37. 2549. This was good enough for second place in my class out of 5 drivers on the day. This time is however still about 2 seconds off the lap record for my class which shows there is still plenty of room for improvement. I believe there is two sections of the track where I can make up most of this time being Turn 1 (see 30secs into the video) and the back straight “sweeper” (see 1min15sec into the video).

The issue with both of these sections is confidence. In all of my track days to date I have lost control and spun off the track a total of four times. Three of these have been at Sandown and two on Turn 1 specifically. Turn 1 will simply require more track time to gain the confidence and maybe some advice on a better line to take. The advantage to Turn 1 is that it is virtually the only corner on the track that you can ‘safely’ spin out which means experimenting with the limit is possible.

The same cannot be said for the back straight ‘sweeper’. In my MX-5 my approach speed into this section is approximately 175km/hr with a corner speed of about 130-140km/hr. As I’m sure you can ascertain from my video the walls are awfully close to the track in this section and any lose of control at this speed would be very difficult to correct. It also doesn’t help that I saw a car virtually identical to mine fly into the tyre wall and completely write off the car at my first outing at Sandown. In summary, I am waiting to upgrade my suspension (which is currently stock) before pushing more through this section of the track. My new tyres did help however and I was carrying much more speed than my last outing which would have been a significant contributor to my 4 second improvement.

Unfortunately, I was forced to conclude my day early after wearing through my front pads to the point of having metal on metal contact. I had ordered new rotors for the car which did not arrive in time so I knew I was going to be running the pads close to the end of their life. At least I now have a good idea of how many track days they’ll last for future outings! Given my car is still road registered the drive home was very loud as I’m sure you’ll be able to appreciate from the below photo.

So with all that being said I’m going to wrap up this post. Like always, if you’ve made it this far THANK YOU! Please feel free to leave any tips or advice here or on my Facebook or YouTube channel. My next track day is at Sandown Raceway in two weeks so this will be a good chance to push a little harder again! As it’s coming into winter here in Australia hopefully the rain will stay away, especially at Sandown with its walls. I’m also going to have to adjust to my new brake pads and rotors which are much stickier than my old set-up. Whilst I’m using the same pads I have brand spanking new rotors compared to my rugged ones that were fitted to the car when I purchased it. Maybe this simply needs I’ve been driving on a terrible rotor up until now and simply didn’t know my braking performance was compromised! Anyways, safe safe and until next time.