New PB at Sonoma Raceway (

This is my quickest lap from the N Circuit Academy FREE track day provided by Hyundai.
Made a couple of mistakes (the most obvious one in T10), so there's definitely more time left on the table.

This car is insane, in a good way. With a few button presses it goes between a quiet meditation room on wheels (with built in soundtracks such as birds signing and ocean waves) to a sub-1:50-at-Sonoma-occasionally-sideways RIOT.

The only mod on this car is SPC front camber bolts for $50. -2.5º front camber, -2.3º rear camber. 1 year old OE Pirelli PZero something tires. I kept mods to the bare minimum just to see how fast it can go that way (well, also because it's the daily...).

While last time I was taking it easy, this time I had better understanding of its capabilities and was treating it as a proper track car. The only two special things I was doing was occasionally taking cooldown lap or two (primarily for the tires -- hey, 4800 lbs + driver on 275 wide street tires is no joke!) and then doing one or two proper cooldown laps at the end of each session like I do on my GR86. I had zero thermal issues, apart from me forgetting to turn on the battery track conditioning mode before one of the sessions. With battery conditioning on the battery temp did climb up to 100ºF but I didn't notice any reduction in power. Note that the previous lap was on pace too (1:50.20). After two track days in total, the tires show signs of wear but still have plenty of tread overall. However, the outside shoulder of the rear tires chunked in a few places, confirming that this is indeed the limiting factor.

Curious about OE brake performance (OE pads, even OE brake fluid!), I actually brought a FLIR (thermal camera) and took IR photos of my brakes after every session. After this ~25ºC/78ºF session ending in a 1:50.83, 2:04 (got blocked by traffic, decided to cool down after that), 1:50.20 and 1:49.74 and then two cooldown laps the front brake rotors were 170ºC/340ºF front left and 200ºC/390ºF front right, and 100ºC/212ºF rears. This was consistent with the temperatures after the previous (cooler) session, apart from the FR. I suspect the FR was +30ºF due to the ESC trying to prevent rotation/oversteer in T6 and T1 for me -- I should probably turn it of next time! Brakes were easy to cool down after each push session thanks to regen and OE brake cooling ducts. The OE brake pads still have a lot of material left after two track days in total.

For charging, Hyundai provided a propane-based portable 120 kW fast charger. As I pushed more and more the car would use more power per session (starting at 37%/session and peaking at 45%/session! 24 minute long sessions). I think I also noticed that as I braked harder (and possibly triggered ABS?) the amount of regen would get reduced from peak 300 kW, and that of course contributed to energy consumption per lap. Or maybe it was just the hotter-than-optimal battery not being able to absorb energy at this rate? Anyhow, I used 5%/lap in the morning for a 1:51.56 lap, and 7%/lap in the afternoon for the 1:49.74 lap. Of course much less during cooldown laps (~2%/lap).

I'm sure the car can go A LOT faster with track oriented tires, so I'm open to tire sponsorship / donations :D