Well after the crunch at Silverstone it was time to effect the necessary repairs.
As you can see the front of the car was most distinctly second hand. With a very bent radiator and cowl and a broken and torn front bodywork section.
Now the trick when repairing glass fibre is to have all the bits, then you tape them together at the front, and add new chopped strand mat on the back, with extra resin to reinforce the structure. Well when I say "you" I mean
Duncan. He's much better at bodywork than me and so did some stirling work on repairing the crunched front end.
He converted this mess into something resembling the cars
previous front end using just a paintbrush, CSM, resin and some rivets! Top work. However unsurprisingly it is now much heavier, and It will simply have to go to Oulton Park covered in red tape As I don't have time to do the long time consuming fill/prime and paint process to get the "face side" looking good.
God I hate having a car that is scruffy, so I've ordered a new front from Tim Pell, which I'll fit and paint before next season.
Meanwhile I set about "repearing" the front radiator cowl with a hammer. The radiator was plainly toast! Goodness knows how it stayed watertight as the radiator cooling cores were kinked in numerous places, but i did and I avoided a DNF. However it clearly needs replacing, and I duly ordered a new one. Now it turns out to be from a Montego Estate Turbo so not much call for these parts nowadays. I might as well have asked the guy at the motor factors for a wheel nut for the Flying Scotsman. Anyway he said he'd try to get me one.
As it turned out he couldn't get me one until the day before I left to Oulton and even then it didn't match the original so a short 20 minute job turned into a 3 hour marathon as refitting it meant reshaping the cowl and a bunch of other niggly work.
The other results of the smash, were bent front body work mounts, many other tears in the front body, a broken front floor, broken headlight lenses and a rather banana shaped rod end bearing on the front upper right wishbone... again this got replaced. So after the beast was routinely checked over for other issues we were ready for Oulton Park
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