First Race of the Season - Not

After the carnage of the chain jumping in testing I didn't have much time to get the car ready for the first race of the season.... so some midnight oil was burned.

The other thing Dave Turner does is teach production engineering evening classes and I've been attending "Big Oily Toys Classes" for a while.  so when I examined the diff after the failure at Snett it was obvious that the problem is that the bearing carriers are just two thin in cross section.  this allowed them to twist out of alignment due to the poor shimming.. and carnage resulted.

So using new found skills learned in Evening class and my new Lathe, I made a couple of much more substantial bearing carriers out of some Ali billet... bolted the car together, shovelled out a couple of handfuls of  aluminium swarf, fitted a new sprocket and chain and off we went to Snett to race.

Except we didn't!  Horizontal wind blown rain meant that the meeting was cancelled, and will be rescheduled until June... "Oh Dear" we all said in our best anglo saxon.... in fact many of us were whispering "Thankyou" when Viv Ayres the Clark of the Course made the call to cancel it and saved us from ourselves.

So I've still never raced at Snetterton arguably my home track.

Pre Season Testing At Snetterton and it's broken again

So with the car together, well in advance of the season for once it looked like I was going to make the first race of the season.  I even had time for some pre season testing at Snetterton In Late February

I took along Dave Turner who is a pretty damn good chassis dynamicist (his blog is at http://dynamicist.blogspot.com/)  to help me setup the car.

Dave was determined to help me sort out my handling problems with the car... indeed I span at 20 MPH in the Russell Chicane on the day's warm up lap :-( .  We ran a couple of damper cycles... This is basically a process where I go out and do a couple of laps with the dampers turned off... and then come in and tell him how the car felt... we'd add two clicks front or back and then go out again and report any changes.  After a couple of seasons my arse is now calibrated well enough to be able to correctly report what was happening in the car and Dave used his not inconsiderable expertise to interpret this into suspension changes.

Well when I say "We" I mean Duncan and Dave did the adjusting I just sat in the car and then went out and did two more laps.... Repeat process until car feels good... then when

 it starts to go off again  back off the last two clicks.....

I felt somewhat like a proper race driver, come in ... report to engineer.. pit crew swarm on car... retest & adjust appropriately Its a great way to setup a car and worked like a charm... the thing is now just so chuckable.  Thanks Dave :-)  

The front rear balance is now as near perfect as I think I'm going to get without investing in some new dampers.

As a result I was now leaning quite heavily on the car... but still the absolute performance wasn't there and power delivery was a bit crap.  it was juddering all over the place in the midrange and this was shaking the whole car and ruining the balance.  I was doing 1:29-1:31 which is 10-12 seconds off pole and last on the grid by a full 3 seconds.  By contrast a mate, in a car with notionally less power that he had never driven before went 5 seconds a lap quicker.  All pretty disheartening stuff really as I felt I was being brave enough and getting the lines and driving pretty well... Not Banzai  but it felt way better than 1:30s. 

The acceleration traces on my 

data logger looked "lazy"...especiallyy in the higher gears... so we wondered if the diff ratio was too tall for the new motor... se set about swapping the drive cogs around over lunch.

Unfortunately we think we got the adjusting shims mis aligned and three laps into the afternoon session this happened

Basically we think the rear sprocket was misaligned and the chain jumped and then started machining everything in touching distance.  This happened when I was flat just after the Richies apex ... I thought I'd blown the engine judging by all the rattling

So I was then faced with rebuilding the drive train in two weeks flat to get ready for the first race of the Season at Snett.ARSE!