Had some real fun out on Brands yesterday, no offs for myself but Paddack corners almost caught me out of the first few laps, by the time I reached the corner approaching 115 mph front end goes light and understeers due to the downhill section so you have to brake a little earlier to have that safety margin. One car spun it right in front of me (got it on video) and another was in the gravel. Wanted to make sure I could get home in one piece so drove at 80% limit throughout the evening.
Standard
AMG suspension is a little soft but generally held out well with fairly neutral handling (I don't have the P30 package), obviously will push out wide if you really throw it into a corner, incidentally the back end was pretty planted throughout until I really provoked it with ESP off.
AMG did a good job with the standard geometry setup with a fair degree of stock front and rear negative camber. I drove most of the evening in Sport Handling Mode (one press of the ESP button) rather than complete ESP off (press & hold ESP button), this provided me the right amount of slip \ wheel spin during corner exiting without excessively limiting the power and at the same time providing some safety margin.
Never did rain in the end so can't comment on the wet handling situation.
Conti Sport Contact 5p tyres held up well until I started to overheat them during a longish 15min session, standard
AMG 4-pot brakes with standard pads were absolutely fine, never experienced any fade or long pedal at anytime.
Engine wise all OK with no hiccups, engine oil temps peaked at around 125 degrees throughout the evening.
Gearbox wise I drove it in manual mode throughout the evening as I didn't like the fact the even in S mode it would sometime kickdown exiting a corner when I planted the throttle unsettling the handling. Only really needed to use 3rd and 4th gear around the short 1.2 mile Indy circuit, 2nd gear only really needed if you wanted to get some sideways action coming out of Druids corner otherwise let the V8 torque do the work. The throttle blip on manual downshift is a godsend which really helps keeps the car stabilised during downshifting.
Now the depressing bit, tyres treads are kind of melted \ deformed in places but still plenty of tread left as only covered 2500 miles since new.
My dashcam footage is all over the place, was set to record in 3 minute segments but ended up with 30s (and lots of 10s) segmented clips for some reason, apparently this is a known issue with Nextbase dash cam when racing around a track, seems to record fine if cruising around at legal road speed, so bare with me whilst I try to edit and merge them before uploading onto my Youtube channel.
