[Traum]

A lot of people consider autox to provide too little seat time, and factually speaking, they are correct. You are looking at 6 - 10 minute's worth of driving over the course of the entire day, and each run is over so quickly that novices may not have time to relish the experience before it is all over.

One aspect of track day / lapping that I would like to point out is, it is absolutely not about all out speed and cornering potential. The venue for that is road racing, and even then, traffic and competitors often get in the way of that. At the track days, I generally encourage people to drive at somewhere between 7/10 to 8/10, or 9/10 if you are experienced and has the preferred (safety) equipment for it. It is entertainment, not competition. When a competitive attitude is adopted, it is easy for mishaps to take place. For the most part, those concrete barriers at Mission are not very forgiving...

Mission is very hard on a car's braking system. One of the quickest brake failures that I know of is a nicely modified FD Civic with Spoon BBK frying his piston seals in < 8 mins of lapping. Generally speaking, the bigger the horsepower, the harder Mission is on your brakes. But the most important thing to remember is that the driver should always be in control. There are easy measures that the driver can adopt to mitigate the intense brake heat issues, and it won't necessarily slow you down all that much.

1) Do not repeatedly utilize 100% of your car's braking performance. Modern brakes on production cars can take a bit of abuse at 100% of what they are capable of, but if you do that repeatedly, it can very quickly fail, as in the case of the modified FD Civic. If you back off a bit and only tap into ~95% of its maximum braking capabilities, however, you could be running at nearly that capacity for well over 2/3 of your 20-30 min session. Depending on the car, this could mean braking at the #4 brake marker at slightly reduced pedal pressure instead of holding off maximum braking until the #2 marker, or it could mean you ease off the gas a little ways before you arrive at brake marker #5.

2) Alternate between aggressive laps and cruising laps. This is especially important at Mission because all the straightaways require hard braking near the end. (Many other tracks in PNW are not like that.) This requirement means you brakes won't really have the time they want to cool themselves off, and you could fry your pads, your fluids, or other parts of your braking system very quickly. By alternating between aggressive laps and cruising laps (I typically alternate between 2 of each.), you give your brakes a chance to cool off, and the system will last much longer.

For myself, I have only been using DOT 5.1 fluids at Mission, and for the most part, that has been enough for my low powered vehicle. Ultimately, however, the braking should completely fall under the driver's control. I've seen cars doing lap after lap on DOT 3 fluids without any issues at Mission, and I've seen cars boiling their fluids despite using RBF 660. To make it work at Mission, I think you simply have to be mindful of what the car is capable of, and not exceed that capability.