I'll let someone with more Viper roadcourse experience talk about setup. Let's talk about
you for a second
T-hill is a wonderful, safe course for learning. If you don't have any previous roadcourse experience, you'll have an absolute blast provided you follow a few simple guidelines:
a) You won't be the fastest car out there, so stop worrying about it. 10 track days from now you'll look back at this one and think "woah, I was
such a novice back then!". Go to the track with the intent to learn, not to compete or to prove anything.
b) Drive at 90% of what you think you're capable of. You need to leave some reserve to (1) deal with surprises and, equally important, (2) leave some excess attention to monitor what you're doing and what effect it has on the car.
c) Concentrate on consistency and smoothness. Forget about speed -- go slowly enough that you can be consistent lap-to-lap and you stay mentally far enough ahead of the car to be smooth. Do this, and speed will come very quickly.
d) Look where you want to be 2 seconds from now. The most common newbie mistake is not looking far enough ahead. This leads to the next most common newbie mistake -- target fixating on the something you didn't notice earlier because you weren't looking far enough ahead, and then running into it
... and so on. I could write a book on this topic (and many others have) but for your first time on the track I'd just concentrate on "consistent, smooth, look ahead, monitor." When you find yourself going so fast that it's all you can do to keep up with the track, slow down -- you're no longer learning, and you're dramatically increasing your chances of bending your Viper.
Good luck -- and let us know how it goes!
