Track Day : Belgians on Track Mettet 2025/2

TL;DR Mixed feelings
Pictures courtesy of Deba Fotografie 

After some minimal preparation, I reached Mettet around 8:20. Staff at the welcome table provided me with my car number and a ticket to get a driver wrist band after the briefing, they also guided me to the coffee corner with an assortment of breakfast pastries. I met a few friends and talked to a few other Seven enjoyers as well. House of Speed came up with trucks and trailers loaded with their pair of 420 race cars, a track-focused Lotus Elise and the raw carbon-fiber-finished Agile.

When time came to go on track for the discovery laps, it appeared that my crash helmet was in way worse condition than I thought. Foam padding was turning into dust all around my face, jacket, in the car and in my eyes. Not a good start. Luckily, there's a motorcycle shop just at the entrance of the Mettet XP complex. I got there and got a new helmet. Not the cheapest I could get, but close to that.

With my new gear, I finally reached the pit-lane, raised the left arm to show my yellow driver bracelet/tag and was given a thumbs up to get on track.

The car was already quite warm from the trip from Liège to Mettet and the hop to Fiorentino. Fuel level was kept low on purpose, tyre pressure felt adequate. So I began with a few careful exploratory laps followed by more confident ones. I think I drove for over 45 minutes in that first run. 

It was all good and fun except the time I locked up the front wheels at 160kph (or more) at the end of the start straight, entering the first corner. That hindered my confidence quite a bit, and I started braking way earlier and slower in that portion afterwards.

I got the car in the House of Speed box so I could check the tyre pressure. The back was around 1.6 bar with warm tyres, I decided to keep them that way, and didn't even look at the front as the grip felt alright. The car spilled some coolant from the expansion bottle again; my mechanic made me understand it was the way it is. That was no surprise for me either. I had a litre of coolant with me just in case, but it didn't need topping it up.

For the second run, I started looking at the clock that's above the finish line to get an idea of what kind of lap time I was running. My time was around 1:30. At some point the yellow HoS 420 car was also on the track, it was quite fun to see it flying by like a rocket. Trying to keep up with it in the fastest curve, my engine cut-off briefly, and I quickly reckoned I was now really low on fuel. A following lap did confirm the engine was starving in long left corners. As it's an anti-clockwise circuit, it mostly turns left. Conclusion is that you need more than 2 litres in the tank.

I hopped to the Totalenergies gas station nearby to fill half a tank (15 litres), and got back to the track. The car worked brilliantly in narrow and long corners, much less so in medium ones. There is a significant gap between 3rd and 4th gear, and I couldn't see my engine revving at 7000rpm for what felt like an eternity. So I chose to go slower, on torque, rather than risking hurting the engine. It's likely that a more confident entrance in the first corner (related to that start straight braking) would let me fly quicker in 4th and enjoy that section more. Watching the dash cam footage confirmed that obeservation :  there are a lot of sections that lack rythm and willingness to push the limits, not accelerating or braking and just cruising around instead. 

That Lotus on Track analysis of the circuit would have made for a great resource to read before driving.

The tight right before the slide, the slide itself and the long "technical" left were a real treat, I could be as fast as nearly anyone and anything with the Quaife doing its magic. The fast section was nice too, I could keep up with all the Elise with ease. I was surprised that the final left, that looked like a hairpin and was nearly unmanageable in the video game, could be tackled in 3rd gear, going out with the shift light blipping before hammering the 4th to the rev limiter (~145kph) around the finish line.

So I'm very pleased with the car in terms of fast cornering ability, and acceleration in straight lines too.

I did not enjoy the sections where the gear ratios were suboptimal. I left at noon and the reek of exhaust fumes was still stuck in my throat at 8pm, I really didn't enjoy that either.

I ripped some rubber from my rear tyres, the surface sure looke racy on all four wheels. My motorcycle helmet was discarded in a bin at the circuit. The front wheels had'nt seen as much brake dust since the change to EBC pads.