8 days to RACE DAY
Earlier this week John and I convened at Brands Hatch for a day of practice. Little did we know what biblical weather lay ahead.
Can’t beat an early morning track walk
We arrived early to try and grab a garage only to find that every one had been reserved. Fortunately though, I recognised a name on one of the reserved signs.
Mark Gillam, owner of Abbey Motorsport did a lot of the work on our race prepared Nissan 350Z when we were running corporate track days. So it was no problem to jump in the garage with him and his rather trick 350Z that he was preparing for Oulton Park this weekend.
Super trick 350Z with a BMW DCT gearbox.
The morning was glorious although we were aware of the forecast, we decided to crack on and get as much dry running as we could.
Sadly for Mark, the Nissan's engine had other ideas with a rod leaving the chat within half an hour of starting!
Not a cheap fix!
Not an outcome I'd wish on anyone of course but the silverlining being that we had the garage to ourselves for the rest of the day. (we did help them push the car onto the trailer though, and I bought them coffee too)
Progress was good all day, even after the inevitable rain came... and then the hail...and thunder and lightning!
During a stint on a damp track John, unfortunately outbraked himself up into druids and ended up in the gravel. Nothing too serious but the usual gravel clearout lost us a bit of time.
Just a bit of gravel rash!
After a sweep up we were left with what John named, a pile of embarrassment.
But it was business as usual after half an hour or so.
We both set our best times in the morning while it was dry, with John just 0.4s behind my best time. A quick review of the VBox data at lunch revealed he was losing all his time through Surtees and Mclaren, so we firgured he'd be able to work on that during qualifying next week.
We called it a day at about 4pm as there was no sign of the track drying out and we weren't learning anything more.
As Team Alula E1 team principle, John is used to the water.
Back home I made a discovery that has changed our plans.
Our assumption was that next weekend we would be racing on Sunday. The usual qualifying in the morning and the race in the afternoon. BUT.... CSCC have changed the format for the Bank Holiday weekend, with qualifying on Sunday but the race will be on Monday. the idea being that hopefully this will attract more spectators on the Monday where they will get a whole day of racing to watch. We'll see.
However, it looks like John can't make Monday so I'll probably be racing solo. It's been a while since I've done a 40 minute race on my own. Could be fun!
Back in the workshop on Saturday, I've started working through the, thankfully quite short list of things to address before next weekend.
With the remnants of the trip into the gravel still evident under the car I started with getting it up on the Quickjacks and giving the underside a jetwash.
After that it was oil change and start of a spanner check.
Oil looked healthy which is good news. Other jobs included rewiring the plug to the transponder which had broken at some point. One of the cameras in the car has lost a power feed for some reason and only runs off its battery. that still needs investigating.
I still need to check the fuel filter so we don't have the same issue as at Donington if there is still crap coming out of the tank.
More importantly though is the failing wheel bearing I discovered while refitting the wheels. Not in the plan but thank god I didn't leave this wrok until next Friday!
Hub was stripped out easily. (Only 7 bolts) and my mate will collect it on Monday to press in a new bearing which i had on the shelf fortunately. I've ordered 2 new ones from Nick at PMS as well. just in case the other one fails soon.
7 bolts and it’s off.
Should have the hub back Tuesday eve so I'll jump back on the car mid week and hopefully have everything done in plenty of time.
Next weekend will be interesting.
