Sat report
Sun ReportMy car wouldn't start this morning either, click, click, click, click fecking click . . . first time it's a no start though . . . Nikki did the honours while I did the pushing to get it going and once warmed up it was ok for the rest of the day . . .
New starter being ordered from caterham on Monday alongh with a new temp sender for the gauge (now failed) and a new catch tank as I have lost the cap off one of them today somehow - must have come off when driving . . .
Anyway, another day another class win . . . faster than some of the single seaters in fact and many in other classes . . .
I fear I may leave caterham ownsership and move to a single seater at some point for the challenge . . . probably cheaper to sell up and buy a bike engined single seater than make a caterham a lot faster . . . perhaps another year in the caterham and more competitions down south . . . hmmm . . .
I'm hoping for some close competition on Sunday . . .
Sat Report :
It's an 0645 start (FFS !) and truck down to Kames, sunny in Stirling but raining/showers at Kames . . . looks like it'll clear tho
Unload the car - it won't start - the starter has finally given up the fight to die . . . Nikki jump starts it as I puch he fecker around the paddock . . .
We set up the car and the Audi in our space (Kames it great - lots of paddock room) and put the gazebo up . . . at least well be dry . . . I top the fuel up on the car (more on that clusterfsck later) and go for practice 1.
First corner and I think I have a puncture . . . the rear of the car is digging in and it feels like the tyre is rolling off the rim . . . this cornering fiasco continues and kinda puts me off . . . I almost abort as I'm sure I can smell burning rubber at each corner and I'm not locking up wheels yet . . . so crap time, 2 secs over the competition . . . I return to the pits and dig out the tyre pressure gauge and pump . . .
The reason the tyres feel flas is that they are . . . 12psi . . . wet pressures on ACB-10's . . . so I increase to 16psi as it's now drying rapidly.
Practice 2 is almost bone dry . . . 8 seconds faster that Practice 1 . . . I'm told I'm still 2 seconds off the competition ut stupidly don't check the times myself . . . I'm actually now back on track at 1.5 seconds faster . . . of course I'm now racking my brain trying to think where I can make up 2 seconds . . . it's a lot but not undoable . . . perhaps somebody was playing games . . . telling me that
Practice 2 was messy, bad lines, bad throttle control, no thinking . . .
I watched the faster guys and they were creamy smooth of course, I decide to use Practice 3 as a test, try moving from throttle steering to pure grip cornering . . . see what happens . . . try the constant radius turn without changing steering input . . .
I'm watching the end of practice 2 and one of the single seater guys (they run last in the group) loses it and puts his car into the tyre wall, hard, at the finish line taking the timing gear with him . . . Nikki, who is mashalling the post the accident happened at (volunteered on the day) reports the first thing he asks as he gets out of the car is . . . "did I get a time ?" . . . thankfully he's ok as it was a big shunt and the car stopped very quickly . . . the car is gubbed tho . . . not so happy but that's only money . . .
Practice 3 is identical to 2 in terms of time but is 10x easier to drive . . . the competition is still behind but I still think I have 2 seconds to find . . . but I'm now much happier that this is very possible . . . P3 shows me that I can now take that run and simply up the pace until it's a little closer to the edge . . . this means throttle steering again as Kames is just too tight and twisty to rely on mechanical grip steering . . . also that's just now how my car is set up . . . it turns on the throttle . . . so . . .
It's warm and sunny and I can feel the grip before I get in the car so my brain goes for it . . . I move my braking points towards the corners, the brake bias towards the front of the car and get aggressive with the corner entry points making the car roll more and naturally go into oversteer whilst trying to maintain smoothness . . . oversteer is under control and I'm now using the full width of the track on corner entry and exit, and am thinking about this actively . . . after about 1.5 laps (of 2.5) the back of the car starts getting loose, the oversteery style is very hard on tyres, the rear tyres are probably getting hot but I just press on . . . take 2 seconds off my practice time . . . 80.77 seconds (about 9 seconds faster than 1st practice) . . . the shaky hands are back . . . and I realise I've almost not breathed at all during the run, I have to loosen the harnesses and open my visor before I start loosing it on the way off the track before getting to the paddock . . . crazy and intense . . .
After my run another single seater loses an engine and dumps oil and engine parts on the track, totally grenaded . . . this delays timed run 2 for a long time . . . I can feel the grip and speed evapourating . . . I have a good lead . . . phycological time . . .
Timed run 2 is slower, I miss 2 gear changes in the first lap and am generally crap, if I'm honest after a bad lap 1 I start playing with the car and forget the time, big power drifts, my head is no longer working on a time and I'm 1 second slower as are a lot of people . . . still . . . doesn't matter as the opposition doesn't improve either and fun was had . . . another class win . . .
I picked up the award and Nikki gets a marshalls prize (almost all the incidents on the track happened at her post) as a token of thanks for standing in and helping make the event happen at all . . . good team job . . .
And away we go again tomorrow . . .
Myself and Lawrence will be at the National A licence event at Doune on 16/17th . . . good opportunity to see the fast guys in the top 12 runoff going up the hill . . . these are the fastest guys in the UK . . . well worth a trip to see . . . plus, I hope, Lawrence and myself taking class wins in class A4 and A5 . . .My starter is now dead, click-o-fcking-rama but no broom broom . . . so it's coming out when a new one arrives for a post mortem . . .
Having gotten to Kames nice and early to drain the fuel out of the car (20 litres of extra fuel is too much weight penalty when you have a fuel tank system that doesn't suffer from surge) . . . of course to do this I needed the engine running (I have an access point in the return to the tank and this drains the tank very quickly with the correct bit of hose fitted) . . . no start . . . so some strong language and another bump start to warm things up and still no joy from the starter . . . anyway looking at the wiring it's perhaps no surprise there is a problem . . . sufice to say that it appears that race teams don't know anything about wiring or current or voltage . . . time for a rewire . . . direct shorting the solenoid coil to the battery helps but is no cure . . . I told lawrence I'd video the starter being smashed to bits using a sledge (so much did this piss me off today) . . . I'll put it on 'tube . . .
On to the competition . . . it started with some great weather . . . torrential showers with a strong wind making every minute's conditions totally different . . . wet one minute then dry . . . difficult to draw any conclusions from practice times but I seemed to be leading the pack . . . there were a few departures (from controlled flight) today, some people will be sore tonight unfortunately, and their cars are not very well any more . . . challenging conditions and people trying very hard . . . it's a difficult balance to strike and could happen to anybody really . . . we were chatting in the paddock yesterday about crashes and the typical spectator view . . . 'crashes are great' . . . well once you know the people, the cars, how much they mean to them and see them getting out of the medics car clearly not 100% . . . kinda changes your view . . .
The Machars guys have a kinda laid back approach to the whole sprinting scene . . . drivers briefing - "you all know what you're doing - enjoy yourselves" . . . two practice runs in the AM, lunch, then 2 timed runs . . .
Timed 1 was dry, weather was cold, changes the way the car works and this day was clockwise (yesterday was anti-clockwise) . . . psycologically the cold makes me think that there is less grip . . . true to a certain extent but the problem with this is that I tend to be less aggressive and the car doesn't work as well . . . you need to lob it into corners hard but I started by being too conservative, this caused what I would describe as understeer . . . but on reflection it's not understeer at all . . . its lack of oversteer . . .. . . and when oversteer is critical to getting round the corner it may as well be no-fecking-steer because it's slow and you're off the throttle and watching the hours pass as you can't get back on the gas . . . time was 89.99 but I wasn't really happy as I knew the car would go a lot faster if I could find some balls . . .
Timed 2 I tried harder, I was still finding it difficult to flick the car into oversteer perfection on one of the critical corners, thinking about it on the way home I had dicked around with tyre pressures again first thing today (wet) and probably should have had less in the fronts - lesson learned . . . the car was getting better lap by lap as the front tyres warmed up, the opposite from yesterday as it got worse as the rear tyres overheated . . . yesterday ambient was 15C and today was 5C . . . when you listen to all these F1 drivers whining about X and Y and how the car is worse this lap vs the last . . . well . . . yeah . . . I guess it's not whining
Anyway, Timed 2 I managed to scrape 1.8 seconds off and down to 88.20 which was easily enough to win the class as nobody else bettered 90 all day, quite simply just mullering it and keeping it smooth worked . . . shaky hands again so trying . . . but more to come . . . easily . . .
Thorougly enjoyed Kames, a fantastic wee track and very intense, you have very little time to think, I recon about 40% of the lap is spent with the car cornering, and if you want to be fast that means under controlled power oversteer, it makes a big track like Knockill look very bland in many ways (I haven't spent any hard earned on KH this year and think it would be a huge let down for me at the moment) . . . requires a lot of instinctive driving which is very tiring . . . I recon 10 laps at competition pace in the dry at Kames would be like an evening at KH or more . . . thank feck you only have to do 3 laps at a time
On the 'phone to caterham tomorrow to get the car ready for the national A event at Doune . . . which should be interesting . . .
Fd
