As there’s a race coming up at Brands and it’d be really nice to actually make it onto track this time, I’ve been working towards that.
After having made the bump steer gauge I spent a day setting up the suspension very carefully. In order to do so I did something I’ve been meaning to do for ages and bought some bags of sand to make a fake Tim with in order to set up the car properly. With that in place I set the ride height, corner weights, camber, toe and stringed the car. I must admit that when I next build a car I’ll arrange for a setup frame to be easily fitted to the car which will make a lot of this a lot easier.
One thing I wanted to do was to get the engine mapped so as to be sure that it wasn’t chucking too much fuel at the cat. Mind you, I’m becoming more convinced that the problem with the CBR1000 in particular is that the secondary injectors throw lots of fuel into the engine. The problem with this is that the action of the secondary injectors isn’t mapped by the Power Commander in any way. All the same, I took the car down to PDQ in Maidenhead and let Mick there breathe his expertise on it. The results are shown in the dyno plot above, which shows that I ended up with 149bhp at the wheels which I reckon is pretty healthy.
One problem, though, was that when we pushed the car off the dyno there was a load of oil on the floor. Once back home I looked at it and realised that the front cover of the engine was still leaking. So, I took it off again and reapplied the sealant and put it all back together.
The next day it was off to Brands for a day’s testing. The day started pretty gloomy and I was slipping and sliding about. Luckily at the end of the morning it dried and I started trying. And promptly stuffed it into the gravel at Druids. Doooh… As a result I spent lunchtime cleaning the gravel out of the car.
The problem was, while cleaning the gravel out I realised that the cover was still leaking. In fact, if anything it was worse than it was. The rest of the day was spent doing just a couple of laps at a time so that I could come in and clean up the undertray. To be honest that really rather ruined the rest of the day. However, at the end of the day I bolted some decent tyres onto the car and set a half decent time. However, in retrospect I hadn’t spent enough time actually setting up the car, not surprising as I was rather fixated on not dumping vast quantities of oil all over the track.
Back in the garage I took the front cover off the engine yet again and made a start on cleaning it up really well in readiness for the RTV sealant that I needed to use. (Why the heck don’t Honda fit a proper gasket? if this goes on I shall buy some gasket paper and make one…) When I cleaned it up it was obvious that it was cracked. This front cover was the one that we fitted in the Snetterton paddock as a quick way of changing the crank position sensor. So, I went to Andy’s and got my original front cover back (changing the sensor had made no difference in any case) and have now refitted that, again taking care to clean it up properly and, hopefully, using the proper RTV sealant. The photo here is this cover just before I put the unpleasantly gloopy sealant all over it. It’s now sitting on the car making sure that the sealant goes off properly. With luck it won’t be leaking tomorrow…