Maybe the Vette was left alone out there so as not to get the other cars too hot?... :shrug::headbonk:
Then I wouldn't be so sure at this point of the winner then haha. Thanks!
No wonder your z doesnt have heat soak issues with all that track time, gm can fix this problems easy.Yes I'm eager to see the GT350 #'s... soon we'll see the car rags' performance results. I'm so excited about this car! :cheers:
As for my lowly Z... track prep is paramount. One of the key additions I did was a simple yet effective heat shield because the stock cat is literally right next to the damn oil cooler & filter! Talk about lack of over-engineering. With it on, I've seen my oil temps drop 5-7 degrees. As long as my oil temps stay below 280 on the track when pushed hard, I'll be satisfied. And I do monitor metrics for example...
This was from a 25mins HPDE session... temps tabulated by the Cosworth Toolbox are water, oil, and trans. The C7's PDR is a great feature!
This is the track prep heat shield I mounted...
After lunch, it's a Le Mans start from the restaurant booth, so I do the natural thing and run to the Ford. This Mustang is very much the track variant, squatting on suspiciously sticky rubber and what looks like three degrees of negative front camber. After the frenzied Ferrari, I'm hoping to catch my breath, to relax a bit behind the family-sedan-sized wheel of a nice, friendly big grand tourer. The clutch is comically light, like it's sourced from a Fiesta. That's good. But from the moment I start the engine …
Let me explain. The only way the team at Ford Performance could get 526 hp from 5.2 liters—the fabled 100 hp per liter and then some—was to reengineer the whole thing into a bit of an insane race motor. Flat-plane crankshaft. So I open the throttle, following Webster in his beloved Ferrari up a series of sharp hillside hairpins that seem designed to test second-gear acceleration and broken-asphalt traction at the same time, and the moment the tach hits about five grand, I hear The Sound.
I firmly believe that when human civilization finally collapses and our descendants are nothing but hipster-bearded cavemen on a quest for fire, stories of The Sound will still be told every night, to frighten children and preserve all that is worth preserving of Western civilization. From generation to generation. "What an engine! What a noise!" says Chilton, in much the same way that human beings will ten, twenty, fifty thousand years from now.
THE WINNER
AROUND NCM MOTORSPORTS PARK, the Ford Shelby GT350R feels very nearly as special as the Viper ACR. It has the same single-minded focus on high-speed balance and usable performance, and if it sometimes feels a bit like a taxicab compared with the Viper, it makes up for that with a simply magical V-8 that brings the caviar thrills of 8250-rpm performance to a beer-and-burgers demographic. If you could summon some sort of Lovecraftian dark magic to combine the best parts of the other seven cars in this test—the Bentley's on-road poise, the Cadillac's vivacious chassis, the Merc's bluff-nosed retro charm, the Cayman's accessible limits, the Ferrari's auditory drama, the Corvette's wide-hipped machismo, and the Viper's sense of purpose—then what would appear in the swirling mists would be, not Cthulhu the Great Old One, but Shelby the Baddest Mustang. Our winner by a runaway vote, the Ford Mustang Shelby GT350R is, quite deservedly, the Road & Track 2016 Performance Car of the Year.
