Took the 3 out to the track yesterday, had a blast! We were at While Horse Pass east track. The car ran great, got lots of positive comments. I think it surprised the hell out of a lot of people, myself included. I was passing probably 1-2 cars per lap, and only got passed by 2 or 3 cars throughout all 4 sessions. One of those was the instructions race-prepped NSX, and the other two were on the last session when I was under 10% battery and the brakes were about done, so I was taking it easy. By the halfway point I'd get behind someone and almost immediately get a point-by...the car cornered very well, and acceleration is awesome at higher states of charge, and still in line if not marginally better than most of the other cars out there at moderate SOC.
The logistics of charging between sessions kept me really busy....I was expecting and prepared for using 25-30% battery per session, but ended up using between 40%, 40%, 48%, and 44% in my 4 sessions. Eek! The onsite 240v RV receptacles only charge the car at about 10% per hour. I had to make a 40 mile round trip run during the 2.5 hour lunch gap to a supercharger in order to make all 4 sessions work.
Started at 97%
Ended first session at 57%
Charged to 70%
Ended second session at 30%
Ran to supercharger, arrive at 20%
Supercharged for a little over an hour, left with 97%
Arrived back at track at 88%
Third session ended at 40%
Charged to 50%
Last session ended at 6%
Had to charge for another 40 or 45 minutes after last session to make it home
I ran into the weakness of this car very early....brakes. The performance model comes with 4 piston Brembo front calipers and single piston rears. I swapped the factory rubber brake lines for SS braided and replaced the stock DOT3 fluid with Castrol SRF racing fluid before going to the track and thought I'd be good....nope. Pedal was nice and firm for the first half of the first session, then got really soft really fast. The brakes worked, but were not confidence inspiring and I tried to take it a bit easy on them the rest of the day. There were a few corners that I had the pedal on the floor. Pulled the pads this morning....holy crap. Not pretty. Pics below. I've since been told the this track is hell on brakes, and if I can get a setup that will handle this track, I won't have any problems at any of the other tracks around AZ.
I also corded two of the Micheline Pilot Sport 4S tires that only had 2000 miles on them...dropped the driver's side off track twice and I think that's all it took. Despite all this, I had a great time, and hopefully turned a few people on to the merits of EVs in the racing world. Better charging infrastructure would make life a lot easier, but I proved to myself that it can be done, and it's a ton of fun.
Here's a couple videos my wife took. I somehow managed to get no in-car video.
These two are from my first session...this was my first time at this track, first time with the 3, and first time in HPDE3 group...got signed off to move from 2 to 3 last year and hadn't been back out since. First two sessions were rough...I felt like I was all over the place. (Can't figure out the embedding, so here's some links)
https://youtu.be/9-XVmu-pjas
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https://youtu.be/tbdw8o04hMs
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This one was from the 3rd session. 3rd and 4th sessions were a lot more comfortable, track felt more familiar at that point and I was getting the hang of getting the car to rotate a little bit.
https://youtu.be/IIoLuqdV19U
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Stock pads are pretty well done. Tons of tapered wear, and glazed over. Passenger side: Driver side:
