KnifeySpoony

Ah gotcha. I would say whether or not you will end up upgrading rear brakes depends on your pace and how often you track the car. Certainly no need to do anything at this point. I would run at least a few days and see how your pad wear is. Unless you are a driving god (some people are), you will be learning the car and it will probably take a couple days to learn the car and start really pushing. If you find the rear pads are vanishing before your eyes, then you may start thinking about upgrading. Keep in mind, you will lose the handbrake, and you have to plumb in a bias valve if you do the "factory" race rear brake upgrade. I have a thread on it. For ride heights, I am at 119F/138 rear. This puts my front LCA parallel with ground. Rear can't go any lower with my current dampers - To get this low I had to remove one of the collars, and the remaining collar is wound all the way down. Your cup spring rates are the same as my "track" setup (250/215), but your damper design is different and has helper springs, so you probably have much more adjustment range to go lower. I haven't felt the desire to go lower in the rear, my balance is good where it's at. Very neutral with just a hint of high speed push so you can really lean on it with confidence.

You can get 2.5 ears for the standard rear brakes AFAIK. FYI the wheel bears like to self-immolate during disassembly, so if/when you do the ears, make sure you have a spare set of bearings ready to go on. Shims are another option- I have them but decided to just swap ears. I would run a season on the stock rear brakes and see how you get one. Then decide if you want to upgrade. If you start having pads crumbling apart after 4 days, or the caliper puking all its fluid at once, it will make the decision easier...

FYI as per my comment above, for fasteners that go through powder-coated parts, a paint mark check is not sufficient. The bolt/head can not have moved and it can still be loose.

I frequent Laguna/Sonoma and here are my takes Brakes - Bite/braking force will be fine once you get them up to temp. The rear brakes eat pads and are generally poor quality (I had 2 different rear calipers seals fail, one of them catastrophically, early in the car's life). Laguna is especially hard on brakes. Depending on your pace, you will probably want to upgrade the rear brakes. If not plan on replacing pads frequently. The front pads last forever Alignment- Front camber between 2.5 and 3.0. I prefer the feel of zero toe, but that's down to preference. Standard rear camber ears are 1.5deg and that is not enough for track work. Car will feel ok, but you will get very uneven wear. I swapped to 2.5deg ears and have perfect rear wear now. Sway bar - which suspension setup do you have? Rear ARB is easy to play with at the track. Leave front alone for now. If car balance is way off on your first day, you can adjust the rear bar to try to compensate. Rake/ride height is your other major lever here to adjust balance Tire pressure - agree with around 23-25 hot. Check after every session Cooling - It takes a LONG time to get the oil up to temp and the oil is overcooled for anything but hard running on warm days. Idling for 10 min from cold will have water up to temp, but oil will be still be barely above ambient. Once warmed in the AM session, it will retain some heat and come up to temp much quicker. I block off the oil cooler for the first AM session (as well as the drive to the track in AM). Make sure to do a proper spanner check. Any fasteners that go through powder coat (there are many) will loosen. Check your engine mounts, suspension arms etc

Oh good point. Being a recent "R" model, I assumed it had the uprated front brakes (also I assumed the uprated master cylinder as mentioned above was only paired with the uprated front brakes), but if not that would explain rears locking first. If on standard front brakes disregard all my comments in this thread as I have no experience with them.

Unless you have much more aggressive pads in rear than front, I'm not sure how a rear would lock first. You should able to easily lock the fronts, esp on the street with cold tires.

The brakes are very wooden and have very little bite when cold, and it can indeed be scary trying to get the car slowed effectively. You better be ready to boot that pedal if there is need for a panic stop with room temperature brakes. When hot, they bite nicely and will easily lock, but still require much more leg than an overboosted setup like an Elige (yes I owned one). The front pads that my 2021 build came with (and I assume yours?), the Ferodo DS performance, are theoretically street biased, but have very little cold bite. I recently changed my front pads to Pagid RS14 (which is in theory a more track oriented pad) and they actually bite wayyy more when cold, but still work best when up to temp of course. Basically, you may want to "upgrade" to a higher friction compound. And you definitely can't trust those graphs the manufacturers publish; IME they don't correlate to actual COLD pad bite/feel. And we haven't talked about the rear brakes at all. For street work you can leave them alone but for hard track work, they need a lot of work...

Slonie, having just recently followed you in my car (during bright sunlight). I can say that the new LEDs are indeed visible. However - in an ideal world the rollbar lights would function only as a "third" brakelight, ie CHMSL. I say this because at times you had your running lights on, and the difference in brightness between the running light and the brake light activation is not that noticeable (for both upper and lower sets of lights). And this was at an ideal viewing angle (since I was at 7 height, ie proper car height). I think if the upper lights only went on with braking they would be much more effective at signaling braking to those following you.

TADTS

I did Los Gatos and it worked out for me. I think the DMV office is less the issue and the BAR inspector is your bigger hurdle. What year/model is the car?

How many cars do you insure with them? Another way of asking would be what is your total of all your premiums with them? The marginal increase for one additional car on a large policy may be insignificant. There's only so many cars you can drive at one time...

Their website specifically says tribute and replica vehicles. I figured a "kit" car like a modern 7 would qualify.

Sounds like a PITA. Would definitely suck to have to pull the rollbar just to take out the boot floor.

I just tried to get a policy with JC Taylor (to save money from my current Hagerty policy) - after a lot of back and forth they told me "we don't do kit cars". Okay... So I'm sticking with Hagerty. I did ask them why the price went up. They said some glitch in their system set all the cars to minimum 3500 annual mileage, but they could adjust it down. Since I only drive my car sub-2000mi a year, the price did go down a little at least.

Maybe I'm just good at puzzles.