Back To Brands Hatch for More Fun and another Trophy!

I arrived on Saturday Evening, a bit later than hoped due to being diverted through Yaxley as a new footbridge was being hoisted across my route to the A1. On route also discovered, that the Winnebago is only about 3 inches narrower that the Dartford tolls... which makes life interesting.

Anyway, after the storming performance at Anglesey I was actually a little concerned about Brands. I've proberbly done more track miles here than anywhere else and I was rather worried that I would drive it in my old comfortable (and slow) Style, plus I hadn't tested so was bound to be a bit rusty

The Championship background was that may great mate Neil Constable-Berry and Stephen Dean are 18 and 14 points ahead of me in the championship respectively.  But they've scored points in every round so far and I've already had my two dropped results due to a failed driveshaft and a failed clutch.  So assuming consistency from here on in and allowing for their drops we're really only three or four points apart for Class B championship 3rd.  I've beaten them both in races this year so I was on a mission to demote them again at Brands and get right on terms with them for Championship class B 3rd

Practice

We were first out in the  morning, but mercifully the track was dry and pretty grippy.  It took me a while but I worked up the track in a nice progression.  57.8, 57.5 ,56.8 ,56.5 ,56. .55.5, 55.3, 54.6,  and so on, actually on what I think would have been my fasted lap I moved over to let a flying Martin Brooks and Derek Jones through.... still can't shake that back marker mentality! 

Most of the while the in car lap time kept me posted on my progress so I was pretty happy.

Anyway when arrived back at the Winnebago a Grinning Duncan shoved the stopwatch with 54.6 unde rmy nose.  Cool! previous best was 55.8 so that's another 1.2 seconds off my Brands PB.

The results had me 18th on the grid and 4th in class B 1 place above Neil Constable Berry who is currently flying high in the class B table... but who is very much being hunted down by me.  Amazingly in the next two rows towards the front were Stephen Dean,Tim Hoverd, Colin Chapman and Josh Smith (2nd in classB) that's pretty exulted company who breathing rarified air as far as I'm concerned! 

RGB is so tight that between 5th and 15th place every body is in the 53s.  ten places separated by less than a second!  She's still a bit tail happy under power so I want to try and get a hold of this power oversteer before Cadwell

Race 1

We grid up and its a new experience for me to be staring at the back of one Mr T Hoverd through the gap between Colin Chapman and Stephen in the row ahead.   They hold us on the lights for at least three seconds, and due to Hi specs ineffective hand bake, I have to do a heel toe start to stop the car from rolling. This is basically crap. However on the Run to paddock I do see a gap between Tim and Colin that I'm going to go for ... but Stephen Jumps in there quite decisively and in the first corner confusion I lose a place to Rob Grant..... Arse! Not being keen to repeat the crap performance of falling off in the Allcomers at Anglesey I'm being a bit too circumspect on the cold tyres, and Neil gets me around the outside at Druids next time round.... double Arse I left that door open!

Initiate Steely determination mode! Neil and I then spend the next few laps glued together... never more than two or three cars lengths apart  , and mostly a lot  less than one. Him defending like crazy and me crawling all over him, trying ultra hard to make a clean pass without contact... he is after all a good mate.  A couple of times I'm along side out of paddock but my tighter line hurts my speed and he gently closes the door. Similarly I'm going for the Apex at the Mcleans`Surtees complex and if I was more assertive I'd have made the pass. His motor is pretty strong down the straights and he can usually pull away a tad. It goes on like this hammer and tongs for 10 laps.  Kate and the Kids in the crowd said it was great to watch... real entertainment.... It was pretty fun in the car too! Eventually my better speed through the complex puts me right on his tail on the entry to Clearways, He runs slightly deep and is about half a car off the apex.  I'm alongside but cant make the pass stick as his strong motor starts to tell on the straight, but I'm much closer than before. I modulate my brake pressure at Paddock to be right behind him again and he runs wide and gets a little out of shape, I grab the apex and we're side by side at the apex and on the run up to Druids,  this time I brake slightly later, hold the inside line and gently squeeze him on the exit so he puts two wheels on the kerb/grass.  The pass is made and I then hold the defensive line to Graham Hill Bend H to complete the job. However Neil is still there fighting back... now it is my turn to have my mirrors filled with yellow Fury. He's not giving up.  

Looking at the video I'm plainly not fully on it... very defensive, and dont open up any sort of gap.A couple of laps later I run slightly deep into Druids, Neil closes up and we just tag on the right rear corner as I pull the car back to the apex.   It's like that lap after lap...fighting hard but clean for every corner, every straight, every apex!All the defending has cost us time and we get lapped by Derek just before the finish... but I managed to hold Neil off all the way to the chequered flag and we finish 3 10th apart. Now I know what it feels like to be in a race long dogfight!  and even after all that defending  I've taken another 2 tenths of my time. 54.4!  Whooo Hoo!

When the results come out poor Josh wasn't seen by the time keepers and has been given a DNF when he actually finishes second in Class B.  For a moment there was some excitement that I'd achieved another class B podium... but it was rightly awarded to Stephen Dean when Josh was quite correctly reinstated.   Neil and I congratulate each other in the paddock on some great fun and great driving.  Where we tagged the rear body work is broken, and Neil has some red paint on his yellow fury.   But the Kevlar in the carbon weave on my car has held it together  and means that it is basically just concave.  Duncan panel beats it back into shape!

Fab... now for Race 2.

Race 2 is the replacement race for the season opener that should have been held at Snetterton but was abandoned due to rain.  This is a bonus as if we had raced then I would have been nowhere near as fast as I am now and would have finished a long way further down the field.

This time I'm another place further up the grid and once again directly behind Stephen Dean with Neil  two slots and 1 row further back... This time Stephen is my target as I need to demote them both If I'm to keep moving forward in the class B championship. Once again we're held on the lights and the whole grid is creeping and peoples engines revs are being bounced up and down as they touch the brakes to stop the roll. 

Again a carp start, and Rob and Andy Grant get between me and my quarry along with Stuart Tanton......grrrrrrr Rob in a brave move around the outside of Druids..... where incidentally Paul Rodgers has just outbraked himself into the Kitty litter promoting me into class b 3rd. As usual I'm way faster than the guys in front through the complex and I climb all over Andy in Clearways and out drag him under the Gantry to move one directly behind Stephen.  Josh Who is now in Class B first is only three cars ahead and less than a second away (he's struggling with grip after a spring change) so If only I could despatch both Stephen (whom I passed at Anglesey and Rob Grant) and I'll be duelling with Josh.... Wow!. 

I dispatch Stuart Tanton with a similar drafting move a lap later, and now I'm right behind Stephen Dean. Sadly its not to be, After I miss an opportunity to pass him as he runs wide into Clearways ,Stephen is not going to give up class B second easily and puts Rob Grant between us at Paddock.   I then spend the remainder of the race getting very frustrated behind Rob.  he's defending well and I'm not being consistent enough to pressure him into a mistake. Plus Stuart Tanton is keeping me honest! Watching the video I eventually decide to take the points, as I can't afford any more DNFs but I do manage another 54.4 on lap 13.  Neil was some distance behind and said later that he never really got up to speed and finished a lapdown.

So there we are another very succesful and improving weekend.

New PBs every time I went out, (-1.2 secs) and a best theorectical lap of 53.3 :-)I demoted NCB a place in both races which helped in the championship but Stephen D gained a point on me in both races which didn't.

And I got another 3rd place trophy.... this one is rather an oddity.  It is inscribed with Snetterton rather than Brands (as this was a replacement race). But Snetterton is a circuit where I've never actually set a wheel on it in anger. 

This glorious season of improvement continues :-)    Another great weekend!

Next off too Cadwell where I beat Stephen last time out... but Neil was some 4 seconds ahead of me..... needless to say I'm going to test.

Now I'm 13th in the Championship

Brands Data Logging + Bypass Cooling

Tim and I use the same data loggers and analog inputs so that we can share our data for comparison purposes. Tim had put together some graphs for comparison between us. My Laptime is 59.xx his was 54. and some change. He's in a class C car with some 40 less horsepower too so lets see where those 6 seconds went. (I'm blue he's the black trace)

Click on the graphic to see a more detailed version.

The answer to where did those six seconds went is simply "everywhere" and at a uniform rate. The bottom trace "timeslip" shows my rate of time loss relative to Tim's lap. It's an even uniform line that shows I'm not bad in one particular spot but simply slower everywhere. The speed trace confirms this in that on average I'm 10-15mph slower than Tim everywhere except in Graham Hill Bend where I'm slightly faster. Interestingly I'm pretty much on the throttle everywhere before Tim is and I brake harder and later than he does. This i guess is a function of not being on the limit of grip like he is.

The top chart is corner radius which shows how tight we are turning and the traces are very similar so I'm not way out of position or driving the track in an odd way. I'm just a bit slower in ever corner and at every apex. The reason for this is shown in the G circle, this particular one is Druids and it shows that I'm not working the tyres at anything like the limit of their grip. Tim by contrast is nicely tracing the edge of the G circle as he transitions from straight line speed and converts longitudinal braking grip into lateral turning grip uniformly and evenly.

Basically if the tyres will give you 2G of grip you should be using it all for maximum braking and turning at all points through the corner. Although the Brake vs Turn proportion will change through the corner. Initally you start using all the grip for braking and will get full longitusinal brake G and then go to full Turn G and use all the grip for turning. I do each seperately Tim plainly transitions nicely between the two states using all the available grip at every point as his G curve traces a rough circle around the line that denotes the limit of grip.

It also shows that I'm largely back to my old habits of braking in a straight line before turning rather than turning and braking together into corners ( the Majority of the trace is moving along the Axis)

Of most concern is Tim's ability to out accelerate me out of Clearways . He thinks my engine is underpowered. Personally I think I'm overweight. When I analyse the corresponding RPM traces the problem is clear. On average I'm 2000 RPM lower in the rev range than Tim is pretty much everywhere on the track. Therefore I'm always at least one and possibly two gears to high, this is killing the engine's ability to rev and hence I'm accelerating slower.

So lots of things to work on here, Brake into corners, carry more apex speed, push the tyres and rev the nuts off the thing, change up later and change down further on the run in to corners to get the right exit gear. No more mechanical sympathy!

But with the thing cooking even when I'm effectively short shifting, revving the nuts of it is not an option until I resolve the over heating problems.

However I am in the process of fitting an oil cooler, plus I have an idea about the water cooling. I suspect that a fair proportion of the coolant is simply passing from the thermostat housing on the exit from the cylinder head and returning directly to the water pump on the side of the engine via the bypass hose (remember I've removed the thermost). The bypass is quite large bore and the pump will be applying a degree of suction to it as it connects on the input side of the pump. A good deal of the coolant is simply cycling through the the head, the pump and the bypass getting hotter all the time. At no stage is it going through the radiator and simply being re heated in the cylinder head with the corresponding problems controlling the temperature as only part of the coolant is actually being cooled by the radiator. So I'm going to clamp off the bypass hose for the next Meeting at Mallory and see what happens.

Testing and "Racing" at Brands

Not a great weekend, no major damage, but generally a bit disheartening in how slow I
was but the car held together with only a few teething problems. Of most concern is it’s lack of straight line speed relative to a much less powerful car (Judy’s) I think it is just too damn heavy and with less power now there is simply nowhere to hide.

As a result I’ve decided to cease developmental effort on this chassis and contemplate building a new lightweight one over the winter. In the mean time I intend to drive this one to death. Plus I need to lose some flab… but that’s obvious


On the plus side, car is smooth and pretty well balanced, the new brakes work and it is not displaying any nasty habits or snap oversteer in fact the only adjustment change I made all weekend was to knock a single click off the front dampers to kill a bit of understeer in Clearways. And my manual alignment was within 20 minutes of arc of being perfect. Plus the RGB paddock is full of great people.

Friday Testing.
I arrived Thursday night, Tim and I had arranged to share a garage so I unloaded and parked the car up in the garage. Tim was already fettling, so I took the opportunity to do a few extra things like stick on the CAM7 stickers. Tim and I got to sleep around 2 am and where up with the lark, or at least with Brands noisy indigenous bird population anyway.

I managed three test sessions on Friday, The first was a 6 lap shakedown, taking it easy and just seeing how things went. Pretty early on it became apparent that the cooling was crap. Even taking it easy oil temps were climbing to 120 and water towards 100. Not good and on reflection there is something seriously wrong here.

However I came in to check it over and see how things were. The only major issues were that the chain had stretched, and the shift lights were not working. So after giving it the once over and a brief stint to cool down, I went out again and gave it some beans. In about 6 laps I managed a 59.59 (front runners are in the 52s) but the coolant went to 120 and the oil to 140. So I decided to do a couple of laps touring round to cool it. but just then they red flagged the session so I had to bring a cooking engine straight in. Of course when you kill the engine the coolant pump stops and it immediately boiled over. Later inspection also showed that the radiator was also weeping a bit from one for the pressure margins where the metal and plastics are crimped together so the pressure had got just a bit too high and things are getting pretty hot.

After mopping the coolant from the garage floor, giving it a couple of hours over lunch to cool down, refilling it and fixing the rad. I thought I'd go out and do 4- 6lap bursts to get some value from the day. Again it over heated badly in the afternoon so I didn't get to do much, and my data logger failed to record any times either.

On the last session I bought it in and it was sounding like a bucket of bolts and only running on three. Really carp. I thought I'd badly cooked it. However Andy Bates came and looked at it and identified a stick coil that had jumped from the plug... and a couple of missing nuts on the exhaust manifold. Once these were repaired it sounded ok. But I decided not to risk it further.

However I wanted to fix the cooling issue before the race on Sunday so a quick call to Tim Pell indicated that there was a larger radiator that I could fit so I ordered one of these (from a 2Ltr Meastro Turbos Diesel) on the way home and collected the new radiator on Saturday morning. I then spent14 hours on Saturday fitting the new rad, cutting a vent hole in the front bodywork, making the aluminium shrouding to duct the radiator exhaust air out through the hole and fitting an auxiliary electric coolant pump. All in an attempt to get some heat out of the engine. I also refitted the electric coolant pump so that I could keep the cooling system running after shutting down the engine.


Duncan arrived around 5pm and identified an even bigger problem.
The Diff has twisted sideways under drive tension from the chain (this was what was allowing the chain to slacken)and the bolt heads holding the drive sprocket had started chewing into the steel shear plate at the rear, so he spent a few hours making a burly steel support to stop this happening. All in all we finished around 10pm. Essentially the tension under load is pulling the driven sprocket forwards. As the left mounting plate prevents the left mount from moving forward what is actually happening is that the right hand mount is moving backwards and the rear end of the diff moves to the left as the whole thing pivots around the left hand mount.So I need to stop this happening using different tension fittings on the mountings.

On Sunday I was up at 5:30, Dunc arrived at 6 and we reloaded the car on the trailer and set off once again for Brands, hopeful that we had fixed the problems.

I arrived in the paddock to much congratulations for actually making it to a circuit and some gentle ribbing, but it was nicely balanced with some genuine admiration for the neatness of the engine installation and some nice "Welcome Back" hand shakes from the RGB paddock. It was really very very nice to be in the paddock again. In fact sometimes it was hard to get to car to stick the stickers on it because everybody was stopping by for a gawp and a chat :-)

The car passed scrutineering first time, and so it was on to practice. Somehow I arrived early and ended up fourth in the queue. Once the session started my over heating problems seemed to be a bit better, I was running at about 1:05 deg water.... dunno what the oil was as I hadn't managed to load the updated software from Tim onto the palm on Saturday and it crashed on lap one, driving Round Brands... resetting a plam pilot will definitely put a kink in your times. :-)

So after 6 laps and with the whole field streaming past me (not a good sign) and the coolant running towards 110 again I decided to call it a day and come in.

The qualifying times came in and I was dead last. 59.6 I think, which is 1.1 second down on my fastest time from last year, but then I did have the kwacker.

In between practice and the race we tested the engine and were concerned to see that the secondary injectors were not firing, so we spent a couple of hours chasing down the fault. But it wasn't a fault, it was a ghost. Everything checked out and eventually when we re tested them by stamping on the throttle rather than winding it up gently they worked fine. So they are not the reason I was slow. I'm slow because I'm slower than a slow thing out for a Sunday stroll pushing his infirm slow granny in a slow thing's bathchair!

When race time came I was lined up on the grid dead last with Judy in her class C Fury next to me, when the lights went out, she got the jump on me and we were off. At Paddock I briefly thought about diving up the inside but wasn't really close enough and on the way to Druids passed Gordon G's stricken car in the gravel on the left. Round Druids and there were two other RGBs spinning into the ARMCO on the left and so unsurprisingly the race was red flagged while they cleared up the carnage. On the restart we made it as far as Clearways on Lap 2 before we found a spinner in the gravel and we had earned ourselves another red flag plus a group bollocking from the Clark and retirement to the end of the meeting. The Observers reports used words like "disgraceful" pretty bad stuff. Apparently people were still banging into each other when the red flags were waving but I was too far back to see it or be involved.

So as the last race of the day we restarted and this time I managed to hang on to Judy for a couple of laps and was actually trying to go up the inside of her at Clearways when I missed the selection from 2nd to 3rd. By the time I had found a cog she was 100 yards up the road and I went down the straight swearing loudly. Difficulty selecting the right gear for Clearways was to be a recurring theme and marred the rest of the day (such as it was) . In fact I suspect in frustration I yanked the lever a bit hard as I seem to have bent it! I hope I haven't damaged the gearbox selector forks. If not then Mr Honda's engineering really is bullet proof.

Although I felt I was getting faster in Paddock, Surtees and Mcleans, Druids and Clearways remained crap. Particularly Clearways which is the crucial corner for Brands. After about 8 laps and having been lapped the temps started to climb again so I abandoned it and headed for the paddock. Once there I discovered a stone hole in the nice new radiator that had done precisely 15 laps. :-(

So the take home messages are

1. It needs an oil cooler, I think the oil is currently heating the coolant through Mr Hondas standard oil\water heat exchanger and for some reason I can't keep the water cool. Either that or I need a wire basket to cook my chips in the boiling oil.
2. I'm slow, dog slow.... glacial in fact
3. The engine seems to be pretty strong in terms of standing up to abuse.
4. Most of the work this winter seems to be wasted as the power loss certainly isn't counteracted by the weight loss.
5. Last year I was plainly using the power of the kwacker on the straights to mask my crap cornering. with less power now there is nowhere to hide.
   Must get better!
   Hmmph