Building, racing, crashing race cars with the 750 Motor Club
I’ve been doing a few small things which are essentially about getting the car ready for the upcoming race weekend.
First thing was to fit the rear undertray. This is made rather more difficult that it ought to be because the CBR1000’s fuel pump sticks down rather more than the old tank sump did. I resolves this with this power bulge in the undertray. Not very pretty but it should work OK.
…I’ve had a few.
“You’ve not updated your website”, they say. Apparently the fact that I’ve done nothing is insufficient excuse. So, I thought I’d cobble something together anyway.
First up, here’s a smidgeon of video from that day. I’ve also updated to the new version of Trackvision which makes producing videos a bit easier because it understands the MPEG-4 files that the camera produces. The eagle-eyed will notice Colin and Adrian too in the clip.
Well, the short news is that I did make the trackday at Snetterton.
The long news is a bit more traumatic. In fact, at one point I’d decided that I was torturing myself unnecessarily and it’d be more productive to go for a sleep.
Well, for a change it all went to schedule. I got up at some ungodly hour this morning and drove up to Leeds to get the car back from Tony Law Exhausts. Good as their word, the car was there ready for me and after parting with the readies I drove straight back home again. I got back about 1130, although I think “knackered” is absolutely the right word.
Looking a bit later on and the exhaust looks pretty good, although the header connections needed a bit of brutality to make them line up properly.
There’s not too much to talk about really as the car’s gone away. However, a few people were nagging me to update the site so here I am again.
As discussed, I took the car up to Tony Law Exhausts last Wednesday. The weather, as most readers will know if you’re not reading up on history, was horrible but Wednesday was a bit of a break in the blizzard conditions. When I left it, the chaps there were a a bit vacant about how long it was going to be. I impressed on them about the track day that’s coming up on Saturday!!!! I know other people are feeling a bit pressured, such as Adrian, but at least he’s got a car in his garage.
Last weekend was the annual 750 Motor Club awards dinner which is always a good night to chat to racing mates and always seems to me to be the startof the season. As such I seem to have an awful still to do.
Hence, eeeek!!!
There’s a bit of progress to talk about here, luckily. First up is that I installed the power commander just at the side of the battery, as shown here. I also had a play with the mapping software which looks pretty cool and fairly easy to use. Essentially you attach a laptop to the power commander with a USB cable and it gives you a 2D set of sites (the dimensions being throttle position and RPM) in each of which you can adjust the fueling above or below the standard setting dished out by the Honda ECU, which is just the other side of the battery. You can also get an ignition module for the Power Commander but that is specially forbidden by the formula regs. It’d be interesting to try it though.
Well, it’s time to report a major success! This should explain that rather bland looking low-quality photo just on the right.
I’ve said several times that I was working towards being able to start the engine and I finally got there this weekend. After considerable prevarication I finally ran out of displacement activity and set up the camera to take that photo on the right. Then I pressed the starter button and, right on cue, it started! If you click on the photo you’re quite likely to be able to watch a little low-quality video of the excitement. If you look hard you can see the blue flames coming out of the exhaust ports. As you can probably tell, I’m wearing ear defenders as I’m always very careful about my hearing after a mis-spent youth. Hence, I don’t really know loud it really was. But, I can tell it was actually LOUD.
As I think I said, I want to try firing up the engine at some point soon. Even though I haven’t got an exhaust system it’d be nice to at least see if it fires. If that happens then at least I’ll know that lots of things about the wiring and so on are actually OK.
Mind you, as I write this, it occurs to me that I ought to junk the bit of fuel that I’ve got in the tank and put some nice fresh stuff in. As is well known, unleaded fuel that’s been hanging around over the winter isn’t the best of things.
 Things have been progressing slowly here at Tim Towers. That track day date is looming and I might just about make it. I’m not sure that the car will be in the state where I could race it though.
First thing here is that I finally got the banjo bolt for the clutch slave cylinder. This is wierd size (M10x1.25) and it took a while to find a supplier who actually had one. Still it’s in now as you can just about see in the photo. (At the top end of the silvery braided hose.) |
 I’ve just about got the cooling system sorted out, although I still need another hose. I decided to run that “hot” line that I talking about in an aluminium tube so that should be OK. One issue with the CBR1000 is that it doesn’t have the header breather connection that the CBR900 had. In that case I routed that into the breather connection on the header tank. (Which you can see sticking towards you from the top of the tank.) However, the CBR1000 doesn’t have such a thing and I’ve plugged up the outlet (using a little plug that turned on the lathe) from the header tank this time. |