We’re getting close to the final RGB meeting of the year and I need to drag myself away from the daily grind, which seems to last all week long these days, and get the car ready.
Category: bodywork
Race preparation
I’m sure it’s not like this at McLaren. In the limited time I’ve had since the Anglesey disaster (see Austen’s video in the last post for reference) I’ve essentially been patching the car back together. I’ve re setup it all up, after having the rear wheel knocked seriously astray and now I’m onto the bodywork.
Setting up again
Yet again, and extremely tiresomely, it’s time to set the car up for another race meeting. For some time now, I’ve been thinking about making it possible to mount a setup frame on the car, much like the one described in the Pashley book. Essentially this allows you to construct a rectangle around the car from which to take measurements to the wheels.
Fettling again
Yet again, it’s back into the garage with a few things to sort. However, before that, here’s something interesting. You will remember that I was in a real race at Silverstone with a certain amount of position swapping going on. It seems as though the action was actually a little closer than I’d thought, as here’s a small battle wound…
Hitting the ground dawdling
I managed to find a bit more time to get onto the car at the weekend. And, as you can see from the photo and jumping ahead a bit, I’ve got the car down on the ground and all the bodywork back on. Addmitedly I’ve now taken the bodywork off again but that’s in the nature of the racecar beast. Bloody hell, though, I’d forgotten how horrible the roll cage looks…
Red again
At last I feel as if I’m getting somewhere. Given what I need to do before the season starts that’s a good thing.
I’ve finished sticking the airbox together, and the final version is in the photo on the right. Actually, that’s not quite final as since then I’ve arranged a couple of little brackets to stabilise it to the roll cage and covered up that hole which was a failed attempt at getting access to one of the fixings on the top of the standard airbox; I’ve decided to live without it.
A damp squib
…whatever one of those is. (Actually, it turns out that it’s a small explosive device.) It’s what the Birkett turned out to be.
I’d got myself all ready well in advance, here’s the car sitting on the trailer and, after a morning lecturing to students. I jumped on the train, zoomed down to Cambridge and drove to Silverstone. There, miracles of miracles (they must have got some new security guards) we got in easily and parked up for the night.
White car man
As discussed, I bit the bullet and remade some of the suspension components. First up is the rather short rear upper wishbone, as in the photo. It’s the iridescent white component. (I’ve got fed up using POR-15 which always goes a weird non-grey colour so I’ve decided to start spraying things like with rattle cans. As, oddly, Halfords don’t sell rattle cans for grey cars I settled on white as a decent light colour. Black would be nice but I’m paranoid about being able to see cracks appearing.
Onwards and upwards
Yet again, too long since the last update. I’ve just been moving forwards very slowly on many fronts so this is a sort of catching-up post.
I finished the oil cooler duct, as seen in the photo. I hope it’s going to have some effect, if it doesn’t I’ve got a couple of ideas as to how to persuade more air to do into it. It’s not particularly pretty though.
Too much to do
Since the last meeting at Brands I’ve had a collection of things to do. You will remember that I said I’d broken my finger in the first race at the weekend. So I did but it’s really rather minor. I did manage to work out a way of continuing to work on the car which involved modifying a pair of work gloves by cutting two of the fingers apart and gaffer taping them together. I was quite pleased with that, although the hospital have now unstrapped my finger and it’s floating free so these fetching gloves are now looking for a new home.