The sound has a lot of low-frequency content ... on a phone it can sound like a lawn mower. With good speakers, it sounds about 1/2 as awesome as when you're there!

This video is from the 2021-Jul-13 "Road Skills/HPDE Advanced Driver Training" course at Mission Raceway in BC (Canada) put on by the BMW Club of BC (https://bmwccbc.org/events/) and Driving Unlimited instructors (http://www.drivingunlimited.com/). I hope some people will find it interesting and/or informative.

This was my first event in a new-to-me 2020 AMG GTR Pro. My goal, for this day, was to become more familiar with the GTR's handling, etc. and start to "push it" a little. I hoped to break my previous personal-best lap time, which I managed to do (by over 1 second) in this session.

The GTR Pro is stock except for the following changes:
- brake fluid changed to MOTUL 666 racing fluid
- front/rear brake pads changed to Pagid/TiKT race pads
- front/rear TiKT brake-cooling ducts were installed
(https://www.tikt.de/en/tuning/amg-gtr/brakes)

During the afternoon, the on-track temperature was about 30 deg C (85 deg F) and the Mission Raceway track is known to be hard on both tires and brakes because (at least for my laps):
- over 20% of the time is spent braking at over 0.5 Gs
- over 2/3 of the time is spent with over 0.5 G forces on the tires (cornering/braking)
- peak G forces during braking and cornering regularly exceed 1.1 Gs

AMG's typical weakness is brake cooling ... engine cooling is stellar, brake cooling not so much. Even with my custom-added brake-cooling ducts on the C63 S, it took full-on race pads to be able to survive an entire track day on one set of front brake pads. Without the cooling ducts, there was no hope. Although the stock GTR Pro has some hokey air deflectors to help guide the air to the brakes, I had no faith that the stock brake setup would survive well at Mission (I removed the deflectors).

Given the huge cost of replacing the carbon ceramic rotors and the understanding that it's heat that causes the rotors to degrade and require replacement, I "invested" in a full set of TiKT brake-cooling ducts with the expectation that the saving in pad/rotor costs will eventually result in a payback, not to mention "less worry, more fun" WRT brakes.

I've always used an infra-red temp-sensing gun to measure rotor temps at the track. My benchmark has been a BMW V8 sedan (similar to a C63 S) that has proper brake-cooling ducts and is driven aggressively. When pitting after cool-down lap(s), the BMW's front rotors are typically 225-275 deg C. With my custom brake-cooling ducts on the C63 S, its rotors would typically be about 50 deg C higher. Before the brake-cooling ducts, they would be approaching 400 deg C so I'd always drive up 'n down the access road before pitting.

During the first session with the GTR, I needed to slip into pit lane and stop to reduce the passenger front tire (the most abused tire at Mission) by 3 PSI. I did this without any cool-down running and so also did a quick "temp-gun shoot" on all 4 rotors. I was amazed to see that they were all below 250 deg C (the C63 S would have been about double that!). When pitting at the end of sessions, after a cool-down lap, the rotor temps were all below 180 deg C, even in the heat of the afternoon!

So the TiKT brake-cooling ducts work _really_ well. There was less than 1 mm wear on the front pads and no measurable wear on the rear pads. I placed RaceTech temp stickers on the calipers and all 4 indicated that the calipers reached 143 deg C or over, but not 166 deg C ... so less than 1/2 the dry boiling point of MOTUL 666 brake fluid.

Needless to say, the GTR Pro is in a different class, when compared to the C63 S. It was very easy to get used to, loads of fun to track, sounds amazing on the track and inspires a lot of confidence, rather quickly. While I'll always be too conservative to push the car to its limits (mistakes at Mission can have "concrete consequences!"), I also know that the car has a lot more to offer and I look forward to figuring out how much of that I'll be willing to use.

During setup testing and the 1.25 hour drive to the track, the GTR got 20.5 MPG, but then the biggest shocker of the day ... the on-track fuel mileage for both the mid-day and end-of-day fill-ups was 2.9 MPG (and that's Imperial gallons ... only 2.4 MPG in US gallons!). The C63 S typically got 4.5 MPG on the track. This implies that either the C63 S wasn't producing about 500 HP or the GTR is actually producing more like 600 HP.

My GTR Pro/C63 S/C43 Videos:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLM4mvbVPn7U6NaNuWqLXDlOogyMcpvvbW

If you want to learn more about these driving events and/or how the videos are made, read the descriptions attached to the videos with (01-##) in the title.

Keywords: Mercedes, AMG, GTR, GTR Pro, TiKT, Road Skills, HPDE, Driver Training, BMW Club, BMWCCBC, Driving Unlimited, Mission Raceway, Race Track, Track Day, Trackday