New Chassis Pics

I've scanned in a couple of pics of the new chassis. They are fairly poor quality I'm afraid as the paper copies roamed around in my trouser pockets for a while. However you can clearly see the construction method for the new chassis.

Final Preparation for the Birkett

Today I did my pre race checks for next weekends 6 hour relay race at Silverstone. For those of you not familiar with the Holly Birkett relay it is basically a 6 hour endurance race for teams of 4 or more drivers. It runs just like the the Le MAn race in that it starts at 11am finishes at 5pm exactly and whoever does the most laps wins!

Unlike Le Man though it is open to any sort of closed wheel cars, RGB cars, Jag XK120s, Caterhams and everything in between even the little reliant powered Formula 750 cars. With such a wide range of hardware they can't all be in one class and the race is handicapped.

Basically the team of fastest cars are the scratch team, in that they get no gredit laps. All other teams get a certain number of credit laps. The credited amount equals the difference in no of laps they will do and the number the scratch team will do on the six hour period. So if you do more than your assessed handicap amount you can win the overall handicap trophy even if you don't win on the road.

All very complicated but should be great fun... if a little busy with up to 50 cars on the track at once. I'm racing with Tim Pell, Steve Robinson and Doug Carter in a Team which will bring all 4 of the racing Genesii together in a single team and expect to do a couple of 30 minute sessions in the 6 hours.

The other guys think we might actually win (not normally a word in my racing vocabulary) as there are only one or two other teams with faster average lap times than the RGB cars. However as the slowest member of the team if this looks like becomeing a reality I'll happily let the faster boys drive extra laps

So today I did my normal pre race checks, on things like fuel, water, oil systems, suspension and so on. It usually takes all day to do this and today was no differerent. Infact I was slowed down a bit by the need to change a worn suspension bush on the right rear wishbone. Anther issue is that my front right tyre is pretty worn, (this one takes all the load on our clockwise mostly right hand turn circuits). I'm not going to buy new rubber at this end of the season (it degrades over the winter) so I swapped it with the front left. This reverses the tread pattern, but the Yokohama website says that the tyres are reversable and I know several people in the paddock that run them this way around so it shouldnt be any sort of problem.

I've a couple of little jobs to do during the week and then I'm ready. These are fit a new rear view mirror and hoover it out.

I also went around the car and labelled everything up so that the Team Genesis pit crew who will probably be unfamilier with my car know the tyre pressures to set, correct coolant level and so on.

Lastly I finalised the installation of an oil pressure guage and voltmeter in the race van. So that I can watch these variables.

Details of the Birket are on the 750 Motor Club Website at www.750MC.co.uk, it a great day out and well worth the 14 quid entrance fee.

It is held next Saturday October 28th 2006 at Silverstone

Next Year's Engine Arrives

Today my nice shiny new CBR1000 RR engine turned up from Malc at Yorkshire engines. Very new looking it is too. It looks like an American spec engine as it seems to be fitted with the standard American emissions control systems.

Along with it also arrived the CBR 10000 clocks which contain a very nice sweep tacho, and I’l be finding a way to incorporate this into the racer instead of the Digidash.

The CBR engine has a couple of other interesting quirks, firstly it does not have a gear position switch. Now the Kwaka zx12r has a gear position switch to tell the ECU which gear the system is in, so that the fuel and ignition mapping can adjusted accordingly. Usually the ECUs do things like limit the pickup in first so that the rider doesn’t fall of the back of the bike, provide max torque in the mid gears and them apply a top speed limit in 6th. Some racers have benefited from telling the system that it is always in 5th so that max power is always available without an ECU imposed limiter.

The lack of gear position switch must mean that the Honda ECU calculates gear ratio based on engine RPM vs output shaft speed using the gear ratios of the standard bike to modify the fuelling. The second issue is that I’ll be without a gear indicator in the racer as my current indicator is driven from the KWakas gearbox switch. Still it’ll save the weight of the wiring but will be a new challenge to have additional awareness of how many change downs are needed for each corner.

It also has a secondary set of external injector (injectors that are positioned above the inlet trumpets on the outside of the butterflies) which are housed and mounted in the airbox. Now this probably means that I’m going to have to retain the original airbox, which has a nifty little vacuum driven sealing flap on the air intake which is vacuum driven and closes when the engine is on overrun to ensure any fuel floating around inside the airbox gets sucked into the engine. I’m understandably nervous about fuel vapour in the engine bay. This will cause me some initial packaging issues as the air intake on the bike points forward in front of the engine. In the racer this will be facing the bulkhead so not to much air flowing there then!


On the subject of the digidash, I’m really only using this for oil and water pressure\temp alarms now, and for sporadic Laptiming. But I’ve never been very successful at getting the timing to work reliably and it’s a pretty heavy unit to just feed me Alarm data. Although in fairness I am also using the output from the sensors to feed into the DL1 Data logger.

SO my Plan is to lose the Digidash and replace it either with Tim Hoverd’s palm pilot based dash\laptimer which he wrote the code for. It does lap timing and sensor monitoring based on the serial stream out put from the DL1 and also does useful things like providing a count down timer which help as all our races are now measured as X minutes + 1 lap. Hmm I wonder if Tim’s DL1 software can display the current gear?

Or if I win the lottery use the Specific dash available for the DL1 from Race technologies, and maybe if I got amy arse in gear I could develop a little minidash of my own.

Preparation for the Birkett

I spent much of the day today doing preparation for the Birkett relay race in two weeks time, we have a set of team orders that requires such things as external battery hookups for start\boost batteries and general things like labels for tyre pressure and so on.

I also finally got round to fitting a gurney flap to the back bodywork, I’ve only been trying to get this job done for 2 years but it has always fallen off the bottom of the to-do list. Everybody in the paddockj tells me that this will glue the back end down, I guess my development as a driver is now getting to a stage where I’m beginning to be able to feel these sort of effects and want to do something about it.

Hopefully before the Birkett I can also get an engine bay floor fitted as I’m advised that this will further help to stabilize the airflow under the rear of the car. The other things that I managed to get under way today were some changes to the race van to try and improve its reliability. I fitted a new starter motor. it has a habit of not starting when hot and I think this has largely been due to the fact that the started doesn’t spin very quickly when hot. The volt meter I temporarily fitted a few weeks ago shows that when hot cranking the battery voltage drops to about 9v as the old tired starter draws a lot of current.

So I fitted a new started and it now spins much more quickly, doesn’t sound like it is labouring like the old one did. And when cranking the voltage barely wavers. All very goods signs, I also started a permanent install for the Voltmeter and Oil pressure gauges that I bought for the Van a couple of weeks ago. Hmmm the Birkett is really getting rather close now…. I can feel the nerves beginning to develop.

Progress Swinging Sump for Next Year

Today I popped over to see Nova Engineering. And had a good chat with Graeme about the CBR 1000 RR swinging sump system that I'll be using next year. A couple of useful pieces of information emerged. The first is that he would really like to be able to identify the sump pickup position during use this would require some sort of remote sensing application that watched the position of the pickup from outside the sump pan. Maybe a hall effect or magnetically driven sensor fitted to the outside of the sump (or a series of them at key locations. I don’t know id this is possible, but I’ll ask my electronic engineer mates on Cam7 to see if they have an easy solution that could be used. I suppose the key criteria are that it is light, tolerant of heat, easy to fit and cheap. Hmm not a difficulttset of design criteria then.

The other piece of information was that it looks like the GP sidecar boys will next year also be swapping to a CBR 1000 RR engines…. Or so the paddock gossip goes. The swinging pickup sump assemble is coming on nicely and should be ready in the next couple of weeks, which is handy as that is just after the Birkett and I’ll be looking at fitting the new engine in that timeframe.

A Fruitful Development Partnership

I've just a very fruitful visit to my local engineering company Nova Race Gearboxes. I found them while looking for a billet sump system for the CRB1000RR The owner is such a racing enthusiast so we spent a long time chatting about his Jedi racing and my RGB racing.

We also spent a good deal of time chatting about a CBR1000 swinging sump system he is developing, and his ATB equipped diff with engine driven reverse. He simply very keen to see his creations run in competition and by a midfield runner at that. He's not interested in guys chasing championshiops as they want to win at all costs and won't tolerate unreliability. What he needs is a development partner to feed back real world data and help him on the development curve for the items.

The upshot of all this is that he'll happilly let me run both the diff and sump on long term loan for free. His plans for the diff were eventually to give it mounting ears so that it can become a stressed member in the chassis, but it didn't take off after the Kit Car crisis fiasco. So it's just sat on the shelf.

Time to rekindle those plans me thinks.

The diff actually weighs around the same as my existing setup, but has three crucial advantages

1. Change of final drive ratio... I bet you could do this in less than 10 minutes, there is no necessity for split sprockets or other nasties. 6 allen head bolts allows the sprocket to be removed. And it has an integral cush drive too.

2. Engine driven reverse which doesn't need re adjusting after the sprocket is changed, and may actually move the car backwards... unlike my current system

3. Ease of fitting to the engine so that the sprockets are in the same planes. careful design of the CRB engine mounting system would take an engine swap down from a full days work to an
afternoon.

It would move a little bit of weight to the rear of the car, as the sprocket is not concentric with the drive shafts, but behind it to increase the chain length and its life. but as it is no weight penalty it seems an absolute bargain.

Whoo Hoo!

The last Day of Term

Today I went the the RGB meeting at Snetterron. I wasn't racing as I'd decided to skip it to save the engine for The Birkett in three weeks time. I love watching clubman racing as its so entertaining due to the different skill levels. Experienced old hands + novice new boys in their first races

I also picked up the front 3 bulkheads for the new chassis. From Tim Pell. Looking at the picture I suspect it is going to be fairly light weight :-)

The rgb races went well and some of the RGB mob were also racing in an closed wheel all comers race which saw stock hatch pitted against RGB cars and loads of other different machinery. So we all stood on the bank with the rest of the rgb paddock and cheered on our mates

The complete field was being led by a glorious bikesports Speed who led all the way until the last lap when because of waved yellows at Richies Chicane he slowed right down and was caught and passed by the second place Caterhan R400 while still under waved yellows. Overtaking under yellow is strictly forbidden and will normally earns you a good wigging from the clark of the course, disqualification and a licence endorsement!. Scandelously the race was awarded to the R400 and the results were confirmed.

Still with the remainder of the RGB field having a great time on the bank in the autumn sunshine cheering the RGB boys taking part in the last race of the year, there was a real last day at school atmopshere with lots of laughs. Everybody was talking about plans for next year and I'm now fired up with enthusiasm over the engine change and new chassis build .

It looks like Class B could be quite busy as several drivers were talking about engine changes and so on to get into Class B. But first comes the Birkett!