Cornering lights and projectors are great. Those amazon special jeep/miata/harley round lights are great projectors and can be found for about $30 a light. You'll need to fabricate mounting depending on what vehicle you have. As other have said, avoid cheap light vomit bars for projecting forward, but they work OK for corner lights. Keep in mind that you WILL get black flagged if your lights are aimed too high, and dealing with lighting during a race is annoying. Each corner is marked with reflectors, so you just need to project enough light to see those corner markers. It sounds sketchy, but you get used to driving off a few reflectors really quicky.
We tried tinting our mirrors and found it to ruin our daylight visibiliy and didn't seem to help much at night. I'd go without mirror tint, we typically ignored our mirrors at night, when we saw our cabin light up we knew someone was approaching behind us, we'd quickly scan the mirrors to see what side, and give them room to pass. It's not as bad as you'd think.
Don't rely on LED rope lights, although they're totally worth putting in. Best thing we did was add reflective tape around the perimeter of the car, and I think it should be a requirement for night races. If something happens where your electrical goes out (immobile or still moving), people can still see you. Also, having a perimeter gives the driver behind you way more information about your position. A car spun out about two corners ahead of me and I didn't notice it until I was exiting the corner that there is a car parked in the middle of the track. Almost T-boned him at 70MPH and I swear my mirror touched his car. Coming around the corner and seeing only two blinding headlights gave me NO information about where the ass-end is pointed... some $7 reflective tape could have made that lucky miss an educated miss.
plan plan plan. We had a driver cycle plan and nap cycle planned. Someone will get screwed, I took the 1PM day 1 nap cycle and just ended up not sleeping. Know who prefers driving at night, who can stay up late, and who can go without sleep. We had to throw our driver cycle out the window around 3AM because one of the guys fell asleep when his stint was time.
Brake pads.. HPR seems to chew up pads quicker than other tracks. We were running some sport pads and went through about 6 sets of brake pads over 24 hours when we normally got ~9 hours out of one set. Getting some ST43's would totally been worth it here.
Have a great team/great crew. Any resentment or inter-team issues WILL escalate with lack of sleep and stress.
Overall we had a blast and would do it again in a heartbeat.
Full Ass Racing
#455 Piñata Miata - 1990 Miata
#735 BMDollhÜr 7Turdy5i - 1990 735i