As ever, I’d booked a day’s testing before the race weekend.  As ever, I’d ended up staying up until the wee small hours packing the car with all the stuff needed for a race weekend and loading the car on the trailer.  So, when I got up at 6am to go down to Brands, looked out of the window and saw leaden skies and horizontal rain, it really was quite an easy decision to go back to bed again.  So, once again, I missed the first session of the day.

I did make it in time for the second session, however.  Just in time for the massive cloudburst which drenched the circuit, the FuryRacer and me just before the session started.  I got back from signing on, having left the car outside, to find a good 2 inches of rainwater sitting in the bottom of the seat, into which I then had to lower myself.  I was at this point seriously wondering why I was doing this, as it obviously wasn’t fun.

Things got rather better once I was on track.  OK, so as usual AO48Rs in the wet, on a light RGB car, aren’t a recipe for an excess of grip.  Particularly as I was on my dry tyres, which are virtually bald.  But it was good fun slithering around.  The bottom of Paddock Hill was a small lagoon, there were rivers running across the track at the exit of Graham Hill, Surtees and Clearways, and the whole track was gleaming wet.  Slow but good fun.  The second test session (as ever when it’s wet) had quite a few red flags, so the session got divided up into segments.  The only event of any note during the wet session was one of the times I overtook Bob.  Having got past him on the way into Surtees, I then promptly binned it and slid sideways along the track.  Happily Bob missed me, but then he does have a reasonable amount of practice in avoiding spinning Brommers…

In the two afternoon sessions the track was dry – in fact, it was positively warm and sunny and all rather pleasant.  I fitted my old wet tyres in an effort to give them a good heat cycle to try and restore them to life – if the weather on Saturday was as bad as anticipated then the extra water-shedding capacity of the wets might prove useful, even if they are rather old.  I certainly didn’t fancy using my almost-bald dry tyres in the wet again.  In the afternoon sessions the car felt really good, apart from the brakes, which are still rubbish.  Spectators at the side of the track, such as Tim and Progers, said it look as though I was giving the Furyracer a good run for its money, drifting the car through Paddock Hill.  Unfortunately, while this was no doubt true, the lap times weren’t actually that fast – mid 53s, which was the same as last year.  The fact I was running 2-year old wet tyres in the dry probably contributed, but to go faster I really need to sort the brakes out.

Anyway, the car ran perfectly, the Panhard rod didn’t fall off, and I certainly felt I was driving the car reasonably well.

Qualifying – 28th April 2012

Not much to report here really – it was the usual Brands qualifying with lots of cars and not much track.  Oh, and it was wet.  Not soaking wet like it had been on Friday morning, but there was still plenty of standing water even if, towards the end of the session, a dry line did start to appear.  I suspect I didn’t really make the most of the drying track, but I ended up qualifying 20th for both races and pretty much where I’d expect to be on the grid at the moment.

Race 1 – 28th April 2012

If my races at Silverstone were enjoyable but a bit dull, Brands was a total contrast.  Dull it most certainly was not.  I got a reasonable start, but still got passed by a couple of people.  Then I started working my way back to where I’d started from, with cars off the track to the left and right in various places.  I got overtaken on three occasions by cars which then promptly span in front of me, including Tim (who’d spun at the beginning of the race) who span on the last corner of the last lap and went into the pitwall.  Happily no real damage was done as a result.  Another of the pass-then-spin brigade was one of the Spire GTRs which span in front of me coming out of Clearways, and as it went round the bonnet popped up and fell off.  It definitely hadn’t hit anything (you can see that from the video) which is a bit odd.

Anyway, I decided that discretion was the better part of valour and decided, given the vast lakes of standing water and the constant rain, that I’d play it safe and dry within myself and the car.  Given the number of cars going off left right and centre I still think that was a pretty fine plan.  Net result was that I finished up in my usual position, 6th in class, which this time equated to 15th overall.  My best lap was a 1:12, which to put it in context is about walking pace…

Here’s the video – edited highlights as ever, but with everyone falling off all the time there wasn’t that much I could leave out.

Race 2 – 29th April 2012

My plan to do a 70 mile bike ride on Sunday morning was hampered slightly by the severe weather warnings, or at least by the weather which justified those warnings.  Once again, the view from a quick look out of the window (40 foot tall tree at 45 degrees, the rain falling at the same angle, and the trees being smashed around in the gusty wind) made going straight back to bed the only sensible option.  I did manage to get a 35 mile ride in, getting absolutely soaked in the process, so felt quite virtuous by the time I arrived in the paddock clad head to toe in Nomex.

Unlike the first race, the weather was glorious for the second race.  Sunny, warm, and by the time we went out the track was pretty much dry everywhere except for a strip of water on the exit of Clearways.  After the usual action at the beginning of the race, I ended up in a Colin sandwich – Colin Chapman behind me in his BDN, and Colin Spicer ahead of me in his Fury.  I was keeping pace nicely with ColinS, and although ColinC was closing up rapidly under braking I wasn’t finding it too hard to stay ahead of him.  However, ColinC got up very close under braking into Druids and I didn’t really fight for the position.  In hindsight that was a mistake, as ColinC definitely didn’t pull away from me with any great speed.  Eventually we both got past ColinS, when he went wide at Graham Hill and missed a gear shift coming out of Clearways.  And that’s the way I suspect it would have stayed, but for the fact that my car started to run out of fuel (Doh!) and wouldn’t pull cleanly out of the corners.  As a result, and not wanting to run out completely, I ended up having to coast for the last 2 laps, which allowed ColinS to get back past me.

Good racing though, and good fun – pity about the fuel shortage.  Here’s some more video:

At Brands I picked up some new suspension components from Fury Sportscars, part of my plan to rebuild the front suspension and rear braking systems over the summer break. Things are already not going to plan, but I’ll deal with that in a separate post.

Rather higher up my list of priorities was to sort out the Panhard rod mount.  After having had the bolt shear for the second time, I concluded, to paraphrase Oscar Wilde, that to have one Panhard rod bolt shear may be regarded as a misfortune, but to have two shear looks like underengineering.  Given that the bolts always sheared at the join between the threaded boss in the chassis and the spacer, it seemed likely that the problem was that the fact the spacer was only held in place by the bolt was putting too much strain on the bolt.

So, I made up another spacer (30mm long, 1/2″ bore, 20mm OD) from mild steel, drilled out the threaded  boss in the chassis so it was just a 1/2″ hole running through it, cut away the aluminium panelling surrounding the rear end of the threaded boss, cleaned off the powdercoat, and welded the spacer directly onto the now drilled-out threaded boss.

As you can see, I’ve also added a couple of bits of steel plate to try and provide a bit of extra strength and stiffness.  I’ll admit it’s not the prettiest welding in the world but it was pretty inaccessible with the rear axle being just where your head needed to be to get a good view of what was happening.  Still, I’ve subjected it to the hammer test, and it didn’t fall off. And that’s good enough for now.

Having slapped a couple of coats of POR15 on it, it was finished and I could bolt the panhard rod back into place.  Since the bolt now goes through 3 washers, one rose joint, the 30mm welded spacer, the one inch wide formerly-threaded bush and a nyloc, the panhard rod bolt is now 4 inches long.  A 4-inch long 1/2″ UNF is really quite heavy.

So, off to Brands we go, and a weekend which looks like it should be more suited to Noah’s Ark than RGB cars.  Hey ho, at least I won’t have to worry about having made the car too stiffly sprung for wet conditions…

I’m absolutely sure that everything was bolted in place properly when I put the car on the trailer, but the journey to the circuit on the trailer had evidently been too much for the bolt holding the Panhard rod onto the chassis, and it had sheared off level with the end of the threaded boss in the chassis.  Leaving only about 1mm of exposed bolt on the other side of the threaded boss… Once the air had stopped being turned blue, I scrounged a hacksaw blade off Andy Bates (cheers Andy), cut a slot into the end of the bolt, turned it half a turn with a screwdriver in the slot, made the slot deeper with the hacksaw blade, turned it another half turn, then a bit more hacksawing…  After a mere 20 minutes of tedium the sheared bolt was out.

The next problem was that although I had a replacement bolt (forward thinking, I amaze myself sometimes) I didn’t have a spare spacer.  It needed to be about 1 inch long, and I didn’t have quite enough 1/2″ washers to make a spacer of that depth.  Last time this happened Tim and I drilled out a 1/2″ nyloc to make a spacer – this time Tim was on track so I couldn’t borrow his drill or vice, so I ended up getting one of my spare 1/2″ nylocs and filing the threads off using a very small rat-tail file, using an adjustable spanner and the trailer as an improvised vice.  That took another 15 minutes of swearing, after which I could reassemble the damn thing.

By the time this was done, the first session was well and truly over. I did get out for the other three sessions though, even if the second session (and my first) was cut short by two red flags, including one after only 2 laps.  Wasn’t it, Austen… I definitely felt I was going better than last time, mostly be getting on the power earlier and turning in more smoothly.  This enabled me to carry more speed into Brooklands and Maggots, or so it felt to me anyway.  My times were down into the mid-1.04 bracket, although mostly 1.05s, and since I remembered that my best time round the National circuit had been a 1.07s I felt pretty chuffed with that.

The other cars on track were the usual mix of Locosts (amazingly slow), MR2s (even slower) but there was some interesting variety in the form of a Ferrari Daytona racecar (pretty lively down the straights for an old girl, but good grief it was slow round the corners), an Aston Martin Vantage V12 racecar (a bit faster than me down the straights but not much faster round the corners) and a navy blue McLaren MP4-12C GT car (unbelievably, staggeringly, bewilderingly fast absolutely everywhere).

Qualifying

With a lot of cars on a track only 1.6 miles in length, getting a clear lap in qualifying was always going to be hard, and it was.  I think I only got about 2 clear(ish) laps in, and failed to get anywhere near the times I’d been doing in testing – in fact, I think I only got below 1.05 once.  However, I qualified pretty much where I’d expected – I outqualified James in one race, and he outqualified me in the other, and racing in the same vicinity as Mr. Walker is pretty much par for the course for me.

The qualifying times brought home the growing gap between the two classes though – in the top half of the table, consisting of 12 cars, there were only 2 class F cars.  In the bottom half of the table, there were only 3 class R cars…  Anyway, 19th in race 1 and 18th in race 2 for me.

Race 1

For once, I got a reasonably good start at the beginning of race 1.  Someone ahead of me didn’t (I think it was Andy Grant) and the pack was fairly bunched up going into Copse.  I’d got a bit of a run on Colin Spicer (who was going really well and had outqualified me in both races) but had to back off due to a slow moving Andy Grant, and so tucked in behind me.  At the first corner James came through on my right, drifted across my bows, got loose on a line of oil dumped during the previous race, and went off into the run-off area on the outside of the corner.  I kept my place behind Colin, starting to think about when and how I might make a move.

Sadly, it never came to this since it all went rather wrong at the second corner, Maggotts.  The back end got a bit loose under braking, I gather it in, but then the back end let go in quite emphatic style and I sailed past the apex with the car fish-tailing from side to side.  During this rather lurid moment James, Andy and Bob got past me, and so I set about chasing after Bob.  I got past Bob on the exit of Copse – Steve Robinson was doing his usual stuff of coming through the grid after having mechanics issues during qualifying, and I think Bob slowed himself down giving Steve lots of room through Copse.  I followed Steve through to get ahead of Bob and then started over-driving really badly.

Although I pulled out a gap at first, my driving started getting very ragged and Bob closed up on me – that the nose of his car just creeping into view on the left.  He pulled out to have a look at a few corners, but never really made a concerted effort to overtake.  It was quite tricky when we came up against back markers under yellow flags though – some of the back markers were going quite slowly, and there were quite a few yellow flags.  And since you can’t overtake under yellows, if you come up across a slow back-marker under yellow flags then the car behind can catch up very quickly.

Anyway, having fended off Bob it was quite a quiet run to the flag, enlivened only by being lapped towards the end of the race and a rather generous Dab of Oppo round Maggotts on the penultimate lap.  I hesitate to describe them as highlights, but here’s some brief excerpts from race 1:

One thing which is rather alarming is the enormous roll angles which the car was managing going into Brooklands.  It’s only afterwards, looking at the photographs, that I appreciated just how much it’s rolling – the inside suspension appears to be at pretty much full droop.  Might be time to finally fit those stiffer springs I bought ages ago…

Race 2

No video from race 2, as for reasons unknown the video file became corrupted.  I must pull my finger out and get my new video system working properly.  Anyway, race 2 was even more dull than race 1 other than having to avoid, at one point, Colin C and his shiny new BDN on the apex of Maggotts, as Colin had decided to park sideways across the track.

Other than that, I spent the whole race trying and failing to chase down Colin Spicer.  James had gone AWOL at the first corner (clutch troubles again, it seems), there was never anyone close enough in my mirrors to present a threat, and while I could occasionally gain a few yards on Colin S (like when we both past Colin C’s stationary car – Colin S went on the outside, I went past on the inside and stole a few yards) I was never really going to past him even if I could catch him.

And so that’s how race 2 finished – 6th in class and 17th overall.  On a happy note, I ended up only 3 places behind Tim.  The bad news was that my best lap of the race was just over a second slower than Tim’s.  Time to beg a copy of one of Tim’s data files and see where the differences are.

But while the results were only middling, and the weekend lacked much in the way of wheel to wheel action, it was a good weekend.  Thanks to Afghan Dan and Ed Scotney for the photos.

On the basis that I ought at least to give the car a quick once over before heading back into combat, I ferried it back to the garage on Monday so it could resumed its shared occupation of the garage with the Furybird II.  Since then, I’ve given it an oil change (having eventually found somewhere to buy 4 litres of fully synthetic bike oil) and changed the numbers from 16D (my Birkett number) to 9 (my number for the 2012 season.

And, apart from a quick bolt check, washing my Nomex undies and cleaning the visors for my helmet, that’s my preparation for the season.  Testing at Silverstone tomorrow, qualifying and race 1 on Saturday, and race 2 on Sunday.  And, in all probability, given that it’s rained every single time I’ve raced at Silverstone, getting drenched to the skin at some point.  Sigh.  Squelch…

However, Steve’s video does clearly show that I did.  Ooops.

Anyway, in my video the cars I pass are as follows:

Mini, Jaguar XJS, Vauxhall Astra, Lotus Elan, 2x Toyota MR2s, 3x Locaterfields (can’t tell if they’re Locosts or Caterhams), VW Golf, Morgan +8, Peugeot 306, Subaru Impreza, Porsche 911, Jaguar D-type (replica?), Saxo, David Watson in his RGB MNR, BMW 3-series.  In just under three laps.

On the downside I was overtaken during that time by a Sports 2000 racer (not sure what type) and a Radical SR3.

Still, back to Lemsip, a big pile of snotty hankies and a multimeter.  Ain’t life grand…

As planned, I headed over to Silverstone on Thursday evening, so that I could guarantee that for once I would be there in time for the first test session of the day.  Adrian, who had arrived in his enormous motorhome, very kindly put me up for the night.  Pre-testing fettling was limited to reconnecting the front ARB, which I’d taken off at Cadwell and hadn’t replaced, and resetting the dampers onto dry settings. In hindsight, that was a mistake, at least for the first test session.  Although it wasn’t raining, the track was still very damp from the rain the night before, and very cold.  The net effect was that it was pretty slippery.

The good news was that I was five seconds a lap faster than Tim, which was a bit of a turn-up for the books, although to be fair it does appear that the J15 is far more sensitive to set-up than the Fury and so was harder to drive in those conditions, given that Tim was also on dry settings.  Still, the first session did give me a chance to learn the track, as I’d never driven the Bridge GP circuit before.  We’d used the Historic GP circuit at the Birkett in 2010 (the last time, I understand, that it was used) but this time it was the full GP circuit.

This adds a few extra corner to an infield section which links the old GP circuit with the Wellington straight as used in the National circuit. The circuit we were using last hear used the Bridge and Priory corners.  The one we were using this year is the one in black, except we were using the short-cut at Vale, which makes it a much more flowing circuit.  I have to say that I’m not a fan of parts of the new GP circuit – the two hairpins in the Arena complex are pretty pointless – low speed dull hairpins, but Copse is still an interesting corner, and Maggotts/Becketts/Chapel and Vale/Club are still good high speed flowing corners.

Anyway, at the end of the first session I’d reminded myself where most of the corners were and learnt where the new ones are.  And had I mentioned I was five seconds a lap quicker than Tim?  ;)

For me the rest of the test day was relatively uneventful.  The conditions got better and better, I went faster and faster, and all was looking well.  Things were not so good for Tim, whose oil-cooler had split, dumping oil all over the inside of his car (and the garage floor). However, while lying on the garage floor bypassing the oil cooler circuit, Tim did get the opportunity to have a chat with Damon Hill – his son Josh was testing that day (in a Formula Renault) in the other side of the garage, and of course no motorsport enthusiast can resist the sight of a car being fettled.

So, at the end of a satisfactory day (for me at least) I returned to Adrian’s motorhome filled with a few beers (thanks to Old Speckled Hen) and a beef stroganoff (thanks to Anthea).

The race – Saturday 29th

We had intended to have five cars in our team (RGB East) – me, Tim, Adrian, Derek and Doug Carter, former RGBer who now drives a Radical in a Radical race series.  However, during qualifying it appeared that Tim’s engine hadn’t survived its oil loss and so Tim was out, leaving us with only four cars. Derek started the race for us, although the first attempt at starting the race was aborted with red flags waving during the first lap due to a 7 car shunt at the start – a Radical had stalled on the second row of the grid, and other cars further back the grid had either taken each other out trying to avoid the Radical or had crashed into it.  The race was restarted about half an hour later. Derek set off putting in some storming lap times, just dipping into the 2:18s, and at one point we were as high as fifth on scratch.

Our original plan had been to do 36 minutes stints, so that if all five of us did two stints that would fill up the whole 6 hours.  However, that plan was flawed from the outset, given that the fuel tank on Derek’s car isn’t large enough to allow him to do more than about 27-28 minutes.  After Derek’s session, Adrian went out and soon started circulating at a more than respectable pace.  After a 40+ minute session from Adrian, Doug went out in the Radical.  Our handicap had presumably taken into account the fact that we had a Radical (which should be a good 5-10 seconds faster a lap than an RGB car) in our group so it was important Doug went well.

Unfortunately Doug’s car decided to stop working shortly into his first stint.  As the ‘hare’ – the person sitting in their car, strapped in, helmet on, ready to go at a moment’s notice – I was therefore sent off onto track in a bit of a hurry.  As ever with the Birkett, it takes a while to get fully up to speed.  Quite apart from anything else, it takes a while to be constantly overtaking people and trying to work out not only how to drive quickly yourself but also how to get past the traffic at the same time.

After a few early 2:30s I started getting into the mid-20s, and even put in a 2.22 at one point when I got a clear lap. At the end of my first stint there was a safety car period, and the team pulled me in.  The plan had been for cars to stay out during safety car periods, if possible, but the team were worried I was running low on fuel – quite rightly, as it turned out I was down to less than a litre of fuel left in the tank.     It turned out that Doug’s car had cut out as the Radical has an engine cut-out which operates automatically if the oil pressure drops below 11 psi.  However, the engine started perfectly OK, with decent oil pressure, so it wasn’t clear why the cut-out had kicked in.  The Radical factory team was at the Birkett with a team of SR8s, and they came over with their laptops, downloaded the data from the data-logger, and had a meeting about whether or not Doug should try running again.  The general consensus appeared to be that he should give it a go.  So we were back to 4 cars.

However, while this decision was being made, I was bumped up the running order, so after Derek had finished his second stint, Adrian went out and I became the hare.  Once again my reading was cut short (once again, I’d brought a book to read while I sat in the car) because Adrian had spun off the track into the gravel at Club.  So off I went for my second session.       It between my first and second sessions it had rained a bit (contrary to all the forecasts, which had predicted a dry day) but the circuit was drying at the beginning of my session and was completely dry by the end.  I spent a good part of the second session racing an orange BMW with an enormous rear wing and foot-wide slicks which had got past me at the beginning of my session.  However, I repassed him and set about moving ahead of the cars in front, including my old sparring partner David Watson in his MNR, from the Rabid RGB team, who I nipped past going into Abbey.

Towards the end of my stint I came across a big gaggle of 6 or 7 cars as I was going through the Vale/Club complex.  To my surprise they all seemed to be going very slowly down the new start/finish straight between Club and Abbey and I managed to get past them all.  At the end of the straight I saw the green flag waving, and realised why I’d been able to get past so easily – there had been a yellow flag (which I hadn’t spotted) at Club, and they’d been patiently waiting in line. Nothing I could do about it by that stage, but I kept an eye out for flags when going down the pit straight and, sure enough, a couple of laps later there was a black flag with my number on it indicating I had to serve a stop/go penalty.  Heaping embarrasment upon myself, I then stalled when setting off from my stop/go penalty…   I finished my session without further incident, and Doug and Derek finished off the race for us.

By the end we were 10th on scratch, but way down the order on handicap.  Unsurprising really, given that we’d had one breakdown, one off-track excursion and one stop/go penalty.  Still, it was all good fun and as ever it’s a great way to finish the season.

Thanks must go to Jonathan for stepping in at the last minute to be our team manager, a role he fulfilled superbly, to  our other helpers DH2, Charlie and Matt, and to Adrian for putting me up in the ‘bago for two nights.  And congratulations must go to Rabid RGB for their pots for coming first in class A on scratch.  And thanks to J-Ro, Peter Ellis and Derek for the piccies.  Video to follow once I retrieve the CF cards from the Shed.

So, that’s the end of the 2011 season.  Once again I think I’m heading in the right direction – I think my driving’s improving and I certainly seem to be getting faster.  While it’s a pity I had my off at Cadwell, the car has been very reliable apart from the blown diff at Snetterton.  The only real problem has been the ongoing braking issues with the brake pedal coming and going. I’ve got some plans for winter developments on the FuryRacer, but at the moment it’s languishing on the trailer and the Shed, and it’s time to make progress with the FuryBird II instead.  So I think it’s time to start a new blog for the FuryBird II…

The bodywork is all back on the car now and just about lines up, albeit not as well as it used to.  I’ve also replaced the headlamp covers (both got smashed in the crash to varying degrees) and fitted the Birkett race numbers.  I’ve also unrivtted the bent internal panels (just the ones around the rear wheel arches on the nearside), beaten them vagely flat, and given them a quite coat of Plastikote where the powder coating has fallen off.

The view from the back shows the difference in the paint used on the rear tub and on the repaired parts of the bonnet.  However, I can always respray the bodywork properly later.  Or leave it until I get some new bodywork – I don’t think the bonnet can really survive another shunt.  The repairs now cover most of the inside of the bodywork, and I suspect another good crash’ll leave the repairs in place and the rest of the bonnet in pieces on the floor…

I’ve also finished making the ali parts which hold the Aerocatches on the rear deck in place, in the absence of any bits of rear deck to bolt them onto – the Aerocatches got pulled out in the crash and took little circles of rear deck bodywork with them.  Simple enough to make, but all that stitch drilling, pad-sawing and filing took ages to do.

Still, the car is now ready to be loaded on the trailer and whisked off to Silverstone for the Birkett.  I’ve got a day’s testing booked, so I’m looking forward to 1.5 hours of red flags and sitting in the assembly area.  Oh, and before I head off, I have to fill in a risk assessment form because I’m staying at the circuit for the night before testing.  Absurd, and another reason not to like Silverstone…

The rear tub was pretty bad – the brake/tail light had its own little bit of bodywork which had broken free from the rest of the rear tub.  This meant the tail light was dangling loosely by its cable.  But other than that the damage is fairly contained and is mostly limited to the rear right corner.  There’s some damage to the edge of the main tub (where it connects onto the sidepod) and some to the front where it goes round the scuttle, but all things considered the rear tub seems to have survived reasonably well.

The sidepod had a few cracks in it, but it’s main problem was that it was all warped. Since it was the left hand side of the car that went into the tyre wall, the sidepod that’s been damaged is the one with the exhaust running through it.  Evidently the heat from the exhaust was sufficient to take the sidepod above the glass transition point of the resin used to make it, so rather than cracking it just bent, and then after the crash when it cooled down it set in place all wonky.

Obviously I needed some way to get the sidepod straight again.  Happily the curved outer section was pretty much OK – it was the flat top section which had warped.  So I placed the sidepod upside down on some contiboard and straightened the top of it using hot brake discs and thick sheets of steel.  Popped the brake discs into a pre-heated oven for 40 minutes until the pyrometer says they’re at 80-90degC, and then place them onto the bits of the sidepod you want unbending.  Weirdly, some people consider that putting brake discs in an oven is a rather strange thing to do, but I think I can honestly say that my oven has been used more often for warming up car components than for cooking food.  No point in having a toaster and then using the oven…

This was surprisingly effective and worked rather well.  I used a hot air gun resting on the trolley jack and pointing at the inside of the sidepod to keep the temperatures nice and high.  After a couple of days of hot brake disc treatment, the top of the sidepod was flat – or at least as flat as it ever was.

With the rest of the bodywork it was back to the usual routine – hold the various bits of bodywork together with gaffer tape, stick them back together again with bits of glass fibre and resin, put some topcoat (polyester gelcoat but with wax added so it sets while in air) in the cracks, sand down the topcoat, add filler, sand down the filler, add some more filler, sand down the filler…

At some point I’m also going to have to make some aluminium plates to hold the Aerocatches in the rear deck in place.  They’ve pulled out of the bodywork, ripping the GRP out as they went, and there’s not really enough left to fill or repair it.  I think I’ll make some plates to fit on top of the bodywork, so that the bodywork is sandwiched between the plates on top and the Aerocatch below.

One tip which might be worth sharing is not to paint the inside of the bodywork on the race car.  The FuryRacer’s bodywork is all painted black on the inside.  OK, it looks much better but it makes bodywork repairs a right PITA, as before you can stitch the remains back together again you have to remove the paint.  This means lots of kitchen roll, cellulose thinners and mess.  Worth avoiding.

Once the sidepod was reasonably straight, it too needed some repairs where it had split.  This time there was lots of silver paint to remove.  In order to keep it straight while the new GRP was setting, I drilled some holes in the contiboard it had been resting on during the hot brake disc treatment, and bolted it to the contiboard using the mounting points which normally attach it to the chassis.

Seemed to work quite well, and by keeping everything roughly flat it meant there wasn’t that much filling and sanding to do once the GRP had set.  There was some required as some of the filler which the people who’d made the sidepod had inserted between the gelcoat and the CSM layers had cracked and fallen off, so that needed to be made good.

However, as usual, the part of the bodywork which had suffered most was the bonnet.  It has some large cracks running down most of its length, and the bonnet bulge (made by me, so it’s survived pretty well) has come apart from the rest of the bonnet (made by Fisher, so it delaminated instantly).

There was also a large chunk of the wheel arch missing – again this turned out to be made of filler inserted by the people who made the bonnet, who’ve used filler between the gelcoat and the GRP to avoid having to consolidate the glass fibre and resin properly.  The other problem is that because the layers of CSM haven’t been consolidated properly, and are essentially just dry strands of glass fibre held together vaguely with layers of resin, the only thing which gives the bonnet any real structural rigidity is the gelcoat.  Once that’s crazed and cracked, it loses that particular ability, and so it’s difficult to get the bonnet back to its original shape even with copious amounts of gaffer tape and some strategically placed strips of ali pop-rivetted into place.  However, it’s done now, as you can see, with the filling/sanding process well underway in the photo above.

So this is what my back garden looked like yesterday – full of bits of bodywork at various stages of repair.  The filling and sanding is now finished (at least, it’s not getting any more regardless of the current quality of finish), the bonnet and sidepod are primed and painted, and the rear tub is primed but needs some more paint.

In fact, the latest coats of matt black paint are the fifth and sixth types of paint to be used on the car.  In addition to the original matt black cellulose paint, and the matt black cellulose which replaced it when I ran out of the original stuff, it’s had HiCote and Tetrosyl matt black acrylic from aerosol cans, and now it’s having a dose of Halfords Matt Black paint along with some matt black Plastikote.  Next job, once I’d finished painting the rear tub, is to refit the bodywork, fit new headlamp covers, and apply one new white roundel to the nearside of the car.  Then it’s just a case of changing the race numbers and heading off for the Birkett.

Before heading off to Cadwell I spent Thursday evening fitting a new clutch to the car. There’s nothing inherently difficult about this job, except for trying to refit the retaining wire which holds the anti-judder gubbins in place. On the end of the clutch nearest the engine there’s a clutch plate which is different to all the others – the hole in the centre is bigger, leaving about half the width of friction material as all the other plates have. This is because inside the larger central hole there’s a circular Belville spring and a spring seat. These, together with the odd-sized friction and one clutch steel, are held in place with a very thin wire with hooks on the end that fits into slots on the outside of the clutch basket.

It’s possible to remove the retaining wire without removing the clutch basket (something I was keen to avoid having to do) but not to reinstate it. So rather than having to do so, I took Paul Roger’s advice and junked the anti-judder gear, replacing the odd-sized friction plate with a standard sized one and leaving out the spring, spring seat and retaining wire. Apparently this is standard practice – it makes the clutch more resistant to slipping and in event the retaining wire has a habit of breaking up and working its way round the engine, which is clearly undesirable. I only had the normal quantity of standard-sized clutch plates, so ended up picking the least badgered-looking of the old clutch plates and fitting that along with the 8 new ones. The old frictions weren’t worn, although they did look a bit glazed, so I revived the friction plate I reused by giving it a quick once over with some emery paper. I also took the opportunity to fit some Barnett uprated clutch springs, which were noticeably stiffer than the standard OEM springs.

With all that lot fitted, and a new clutch cover gasket ready to go, I could refit the clutch cover. This is a rather fiddly job, as it involves ensuring that the clutch release pin (which has rack type gear teeth on it) and the clutch actuating arm (which has a spur gear on it) both mate and align properly so that the clutch release arm is in its proper position. However, it wasn’t as bad as I’d feared, and with a bit of juggling everything was in place.

After a quick refill of oil, I got all this finished just before 9pm, and got ready to take the car for a quick spin to make sure the clutch slip was cured. At that point, it started binning it down with rain, so I had to delay my test drive until 10 pm. Good thing I repacked the silencer. Given the wet conditions all I was able to do was satisfy myself that the clutch now had more grip than cold AO48Rs on a wet A142 (which frankly isn’t that stiff a challenge) but copious amounts of wheelspin in 4th gear did suggest the new clutch and clutch springs were doing their job.

Cadwell testing

The last time I drove at Cadwell was in 2003, when I raced there. Indeed, until I started racing again in 2009, my race at Cadwell was the only race I actually finished. Even if it was in last place, and I was subsequently disqualified for a technical infringement. So although I’d driven at the track before (and so didn’t need to attend the first time drivers briefing) I could hardly claim to be a Cadwell expert. So a day’s testing seemed like a good idea, to try and get up to speed at Cadwell.

Given my late night car testing, I wasn’t all that keen to get up a 4.30am when my alarm went off, and so decided that personal safety required that I had a bit of a lie in. As a result, once again, I didn’t make the first test session or indeed the second. I did arrive just in time for the last test session of the morning. However, this, along with all my sessions bar one, was red flagged. The trouble was that the sessions were divided up into three categories. The SaxMax children, who aren’t allowed on track at the same time as the big boys and girls because they’re too delicate/inept (delete depending on your point of view), the single seaters, and then everyone else, including us RGB cars. That meant we were on track at the same time as a gaggle of Locosts of varying speeds, MR2s, kit cars, and other assorted vehicles.

The driving standards in testing were, as usual, rather varied. Some of the MR2 drivers seemed oblivious to the fact there was anyone else on the track, and one Elise in particular seemed happy to shamble around all over the track, to the inconvenience of everyone else. On one memorable lap he managed to baulk Tim (who’d just got past me) three times in half a lap. I’ll give the driver the benefit of the doubt and assume it wasn’t on purpose, but it was pretty appalling driving all the same.

Although I could tell that there was still plenty of time to be gained, I was reasonably happy with my pace. Although Tim got past me, he didn’t pull away particularly and the limited testing we did get proved useful nonetheless. However, it was rather limited due to three red flags. One caused by a MR2 which managed to mount a tyre wall, backwards, one due to a Locost which went into the barriers sideways at the Mountain, and one for something else I can’t remember. In fact, the only red-flag-free session we got was the last one. And I didn’t finish that one, as I ran out of fuel halfway through. A tad embarrassing, yes, but in my defence I’d been busy prior to the session fitting my old wet weather tyres – given the weather forecast it seemed like a good idea to try and give them a heat cycle and try and put some life back into them. In my rush to fit the wets, I forgot about checking the fuel level…

Saturday – Qualifying

It’s pretty hard to pass at Cadwell and so the queue for the assembly area for practice started about an hour before it was due to start. I wasn’t that bothered, and so was right at the back of the queue. Ironically, they let us out of the assembly area in two groups, having lined us up down both sides of the assembly area. I was in the first group, and so managed to get on track ahead of several people who’d spent quite a long time queuing. I set off onto the track behind James Fowley’s fire-breathing Fury, who promptly fell off at Hall Bends – apparently he went for the brake pedal, but inadvertently pressed both the brake and the throttle. Happily he managed to keep the car out of the barriers and lived to fight another day.

I spent a few laps getting out of the way of faster cars who’d been busy queuing and overtaking some of the slower cars who’d been at the back of the second group of cars onto the track. Once they’d got past, James Walker also got past me. Now I usually end up racing at around the same point in the grid as James, so I stuck onto his tail. However, he pulled off at the end of the start/finish straight with what turned out to be clutch issues.

I only really got some clear laps towards the end of the session, and my lap times were falling by about a second a lap towards the end, so my best laps were my last two. After one decent clear lap (clear apart from Tim Pell who was once again trundling round during practice) I could see the marshall on the finish line starting to unfurl the chequered flag. Time to get in a decent lap time, and I knew from the dashboard display that I’d done a 1:40.15, which was significantly faster than I’d gone in testing a quite a bit faster than some other people who’d been out the day before.

This is my best lap from practice. As you can see, I’ve treated myself to some software which allows me to overlay the data from my data logger onto the video. Still a work in progress, mind you. And data from the brake pressure senders is a bit dirty, so there’s some random spikes on the braking read-out where I wasn’t actually braking. Still, the speed and revs should be accurate.

Back in the paddock, it turned out that everyone had gone faster than on the Friday, and so I qualified in my usual position of 16th for the first race and 17th for the second. I was about 2.5 seconds down on Tim though, which is rather a larger gap than usual.

Saturday – Race 1

By the time of our first race, it was raining and the track was pretty wet. I decided to stick with my wet weather tyres, even though they are rather old, rather than going for my newer ‘dry’ weather tyres, as Cadwell Park can have standing water in places when it’s wet and the wet tyres do clear standing water rather better than the drys.

I got a pretty good start at the start of the race, but this was for nothing as after a couple of laps the race was red flagged. Tim Pell had spun at the Hall Bends and was facing the oncoming traffic on the outside of one corner. So it was back to the start to try again, this time with a shortened race of 9 minutes plus one lap.

My start wasn’t brilliant, but it wasn’t too bad. Despite that, both Ben and David Watson managed to get past me in fairly short order. I’m not quite sure why I keep on losing places at the beginning of races, even with a half decent start. I think it’s simply because I’m too timid with the other cars around me. Might be time to start asserting myself a bit more at the start of races, although not to the extent that appears acceptable to F1 drivers.

I settled down to a couple of laps behind David, but I knew I could go a lot faster if I could get past him. However, David was driving pretty well, and there were certainly no easy passing opportunities. Eventually, I got a half-decent run on him down the start-finish straight and went past him under braking into Coppice. The car started sliding halfway through the move, but this was just the effect of changing down mid-corner and although it may not look like it, it was all under control really. Once I’d got past David I had a lonely run to the flag, other than having to adopt evasive manoeuvres to avoid Ben, who’d spun at the bottom of Mansfield. During the last couple of laps I was catching Colin hand over fist (with 40bhp I really ought to though) and if there’d been one more lap I reckon I could have got past him. But it was not to be, so I finished 11th, 6th in class.

Sunday – Race 2

After a very convivial evening spent drinking beer under Tim’s awning and in Austen’s gazebo, it was soon time for Sunday’s race. By this stage the skies had cleared – well, it was no longer raining, at least – but the track was still damp albeit with a bit of a dry line developing. I got a tolerably good start, but David Watson still managed to get past me at the start. Then Ben pulled alongside me around Charlies, taking the inside line. We went round Charles and Park corners side by side, and determined as I was not to give up another place during the first lap of a race, I tried to stick with him round the outside of Chris Curves. However, he was on the dry inside line, and I was on the wet outside line. The net result was that the car understeered off towards the outside of the corner, which left me with my two outside wheels on the grass. That led fairly swiftly to four wheels on the grass, and given the amount of grip on wet grass (none) to a brief meeting with the tyre wall.

Having clobbered the tyre wall I was in no mood to hang around, so killed the power using the Big Red Switch and hopped out. This of course means no video – I forgot to turn off the video before killing the power. But it’s all visible from Bob’s footage – I’m the black car in front of him, and it’s about 1 minute in where I gracefully exit stage left.

So I ended up watching the race from the marshall’s post on the outside of Chris Curves. Damage to the car isn’t that significant – I drove back to the paddock, albeit with bits of bodywork scraping, rubbing and generally flailing around. A provisional inspection, having taken the damaged rear tub, bonnet and sidepod off the car, is that apart from the bonnet support and the hinge mounts for the rear tub, the chassis and suspension is fine. The bodywork, on the other hand, has taken a bit of a kicking – the tail/brake light was hanging loose on its own bit of the rear tub which had parted company from the rest, and the bonnet has several long cracks in it.

So the bad news is that it’s time to bust out the GRP and filler again, and patch up the bodywork in time for the Birkett. The good news is that it seems that, despite my DNF in race 2, I’ve managed to retain 9th place in the RGB Championship, one place behind Tim. Which is nice.

Right, I’m off to go and glue some really badly made GRP bodywork back together again. Thanks once again to Afghan Dan, the Squirrel himself for the photos.

I’d repacked the silencer when I first built the FuryRacer, but that was over 2 years, and a fair few racing miles, ago and so the chances were it was time to do that job again. I’d packed the silencer previously with the fluffy e-glass which Raceco supply with their titanium silencers (I’ve got one on the FuryBirdII) but this time I thought I’d try something different and so bought some basalt packing material from Merlin Motorsport. This apparently needs to be used with wire wool in the centre of the silencer, packed around the perforated tube which goes down the middle of the silencer, as otherwise the basalt will get blown straight out. I chose the basalt as it’s supposed to withstand high temperatures better than e-glass. The silencer in the Fury is encased in the sidepod, and has the gases from the cat going straight into it, so I suspect it gets pretty toasty.

The first job was to remove the sidepod, then remove the silencer, and then drill out the rivets holding the end-cap in place and remove it, along with the central perforated tube. This was all fairly straightforward, and confirmed that there was indeed very little packing material left in the silencer – just the little piece shown in the photo on the left. Lots of little pieces of a vaguely silver material came out too. Didn’t seem to be metallic, it looked more like little bits of silicon or some ceramic type of material. No idea where it came from. I did wonder if it was a sign that the cat was breaking up, but from the exhaust end it looked fine.

The next job was to wind some of the wire wool round the central perforated tube. In order to keep it in place while I was winding it into place, I used some lockwire to hold it in place as I would the wire wool into place.
At this point it would’ve been most convenient if the perforated central tube could be removed from the end cap and re-inserted in the can so that the wadding could just be packed around it. However, it proved impossible to remove it from the end cap, so that wasn’t going to be possible.

So instead, I loosely placed the basalt packing in place, and then held it there using strips of masking tape looped around it. The masking tape will probably mostly burn up inside the car, but that’s fine, as by then it will have finished doing its job of holding the basalt backing in place while the whole lot gets inserted into the outer casing of the exhaust can. Which it did.

So, one exhaust can repacked. Downside is that it’s noticeably heavier with all that basalt wadding and wire wool in it. Upside is I won’t have to worry about noise tests. Next job is to replace the clutch. Clutch friction plates and steels have been ordered, along with the clutch cover gaskets, and I’m just waiting for them to be ready for collection.

Oh, and a quick bit of RGB Championship news. I was listed as being 2 points behind Tim before Pembrey, and I’d rather hoped that my third place might put me level or above him. However, the third place was only since Tim Gray wasn’t registered in class F and so wasn’t eligible for class F points. However, it seems Tim G wasn’t registered for class R either, so there’s been a rejigging of the championship points. Net result is that I’m now 7 points behind Tim. However, I do appear to be 9th overall and 4th in class in the Championship at present. Which is thoroughly undeserved!

* ignore the fake 404 page.  Actually don’t. It’s pretty representative of [cam7]…