Are you sitting down? We hope so as this feature is a big one! An in-depth account of all that unravelled over 3 days of World Time Attack this year! We hope you enjoy!
It’s 2am on Thursday morning. The Heasmans S14 was a midnight late addition to Tune House’s Dyno schedule. With Jim’s expert touch, the Heasman’s S14 produced maximum power (380kw) at the safest levels given it was a freshly built engine. Check out Heasman’s Road to World Time Attack 2014 here.
We love a good battle and Sydney’s traffic didn’t disappoint. Our S14’s delayed arrival to Sydney Motorsport Park only brought smiles to our Pit Crew who had all the time in the world to prepare our S14’s home for the next three days. Lucky for us, as there were some really challenging times ahead.
A professional as always the late arrival of our S14 didn’t faze Nathan Antunes who used the time to sit with Scott Mitchell and give his thoughts on how our S14’s recent improvements would benefit his times throughout the weekend. Stay tuned for Scott Mitchell’s video.
Nathan put our S14 through it’s paces on Practice day Thursday but only managed to get in one flying hot lap before disaster struck and he started losing oil pressure. Nathan nursed our S14 back to the pits where we discovered a large oil leak from the rocker cover gasket. We sent one of the mechanics out to find us one! Once we had fitted the new gasket the Practice sessions had closed for the day.
One of the best looking Evo’s out there! Indy’s IS Motor Racing Evo (running Bilstein 3 way adjustable dampers) at the hands of Tim Macrow hoping for a hot run this year. Their weekend starts with a gearbox issue. Tim having to physically hold the stick in 4th while piloting around with his other hand. Wasn’t too long before Indy made the call, and the Evo-9 was sent to the workshop for an overnight repair..
Again only our Pit Crew were smiling as they had so much time on their hands to ready our S14 for Friday’s Sessions.
Jonathan pulls off the rocker cover to reveal the damaged gasket, and at this point we are still hopeful we can replace the gasket in no time to get back out for one more session in. Wasn’t to be.
With time on our hands we had the opportunity to take some of valued customer’s race machines out on track for a relaxed photoshoot.
One of our trusty Golf Karts for the weekend supplied by Golf Cart World, best decision EVER!
With two flying Hot laps as the Plan, Nathan Antunes attacked Friday’s first session with a blistering first lap time of 1:35:1.
In the second flying lap, as Nathan powered out of turn 8, disaster struck yet again. Smoke started to fill the cabin and as the saying goes where there is smoke there is fire. Flames started to develop from one of the bonnet vents and Nathan quickly aborted his flying hot lap, resisting the urge to activate the fire bomb system. Nathan nursed our car back to the pits where our crew quickly extinguished the fire. No smiles from our pit crew now!
Drew Halls car was on fire from the second it fired up! With the addition of their new Top Stage V3 front bar/splitter, their front-end Aero greatly over powered the rear, which saw Drew Hall having big balance issues. We quickly pulled the rear wing off our R35 GTR and lent it to Drew for the weekend. Drew was able to punch out lap after lap with improved corner speed and stability, and our engineers where on hand to help him adjust his 3 way adjustable Bilstein dampers to suit the new aero set up.
Australia’s Fastest 86 – Tunehouse set-out to build the ultimate 86, and if they wanted to achieve that, they needed the ultimate in handling performance. This car is running Bilstein B16 dampers, an off the shelf coilover kit that clearly proves itself on the track! Mechanically the car was running exactly how they wanted and with the partnership formed with Bilstein achieved leaps and bounds ahead of what we even thought was possible. Congratulations to Jim and his team from Tunehouse, for taking the title of the fastest 86 in Australia, second year in a row.
Our pit crew quickly established that an oil line was the cause of the fire and they were back to work so that our car was ready for the next session.
Using time wisely, Mitch from HalTech pulled the data from our S14’s ECU and along with Nathan and Matt, they assessed our car’s tune and performance.
The Tunehouse 86, achieved a lap time of 1:42.8, making it the fastest Toyota 86 for the second year in a row!
Our chief engineer, Jonathon, worked hard to repair the fire damaged S14 and by the time we got some new oil lines made, we had missed our mid day session. Luckily Jonathon had our S14 ready for the afternoon session.
Nathan jumped back into the car and smashed out a few laps that afternoon until we brought the car back into the pits to check all the data logging and quickly noticed the fire had damaged some wiring in the engine bay, and also cooked our Haltech Wideband controller.
After returning with a freshly rebuilt geabox, The IS Motor Racing guys were keen to get back into the car and give Tim a fair crack. Three full sessions into Day-2 the Evo-9 blew a turbo. Time Attack was over with a best time of 1:33..78.
Our wiring guy quickly fixed the damaged wiring and the always helpful Mitch (Haltech) came to the rescue with a replacement wideband controller. During testing we had overheating issues so as a precaution we removed the waste gate to to make sure it was still doing it’s job. We skipped dinner and got the S14 back together at around 830pm. With high hopes we fired her up and to our surprise we noticed it had an exhaust leak, which was actually a failure of the turbo to manifold gasket. Luckily, we ended up finding one at around 9:30 pm and Jonathon put the whole car back together so we were ready to rock and roll on Saturday morning…
Pro driver Nathan Antunes starting day 3 with a brief re-cap of yesterday’s disaster and our hopes for the day to come.
Nathan rocketed out for our first session on Saturday morning with a 1:35.0 which became our fastest time of the weekend. The car was suffering from major boosting issues, which we could not fix. The boost was cutting every where and that raised our concern for the life of our brand new engine. We wanted to get more than one weekend out of it.
Thankfully our tuner Jim from tunehouse was there to plug in and adjust our tune so Nathan could continue driving laps for the rest of the day without damaging our engine. Jim was with us all weekend, and was ready to help us whenever we needed it. Thanks Jim!!
With David Lord behind the wheel of the Tunehouse WRX STi something that impressed the entire team here happened. “It’s been a long time coming but we finally managed to get a podium in one of the biggest events of the Australia racing calendar” – Jim and the entire team at Tunehouse were ecstatic..
The THR-86 making the rounds, and fast! The Tunehouse team continued their dominance, with Josh Muggleton behind the wheel.
A big congratulations to Drew Hall! He had a bullet proof car all day, setting a best of 1:36.73. A solid effort by our long time customer, and our pit mate for the weekend!
It’s always great to get our S14 out on the track. The atmosphere and reaction from the crowd was overwhelming. Big credit to everybody involved in World Time Attack for bringing such a great event to Sydney Motorsport Park, it gets better and better every year.
We were very happy with our result in 2014 as we were 2.2 seconds faster than last year considering we did not make any changes to the aerodynamics or weight of our S14. We can credit our enhanced performace to a little bit more power and a few more suspension tweaks. It always helps to have a great driver in the likes of Nathan Antunes.
We look forward to 2015 where we hope to eclipse our 2014 result.
Big shout out and thank you to the following:
Nathan Antunes.
Jim and his team from Tunehouse.
Mitch from Haltech.
Justin from Prowire.
Zi and the team from JDMYARD.
2sus Custom Re-Sprays.
Peter and John from Ideal Lubricants.
Berty from Cars For Hope.
Ved from SELECTNINE for event photo coverage.
Scott from Scott Mitchell Media for the event video coverage.
Last but not least, our smiling crew that keep our S14 on track,Jono, Matt, Chris, Jarrod, Paul and Brad Heasman.Check out our final testing session prior to WTAC at Wakefield Park
The Road to World Time Attack Challenge 2014
