Fettling…

Well, it’s back to that in-between races fettling period. In fact, it’s a bit more than that for me because I’m going off to Spa again in a while for a couple of days whizzing around the track. Although that’s a trackday and as such I won’t be able to time myself I’m still planning on using the occasion (apart from the sheer rush from shooting up Eau Rouge) to do a bit of testing. As such I’m planning on trying a few new things.

The first of these is something I’ve been meaning to try for a long time as Carroll Smith bangs on about it a lot. This is a rather more sophisticated bump stop, something that gives a more progressive aspect to the spring. The standard bump stop on my dampers is that black thing on the left of the photo. The yellow thing at the side is a progressive rate version, made by those nice Powerflex people. These look like, and perhaps are, the same sort of thing that appear on Paul’s new car and it was that that provoked me to try it.

So, I’ve mounted a collection of these on the car, we’ll see how it goes. Of course, I’ll probably end up changing everything else in the process and confusing myself again.

Next thing was to change the way the rear ARB articulates. I’ve also “indexed” it by adding a lump of steel with some holes in it. It was squeaking before, rather alarmingly, which I think was due to the mechanism binding and I’m hoping this will sort it. As I said at Cadwell I was making all this stiffer and stiffer so I may end up making a fatter bar entirely.

Since the photo here I’ve found the rod ends that I couldn’t find at the time and straightened up the linkages so that everything is closer to a right angle, before you all start telling me that this is horrible. (In other words, yes, I know… 🙂 )

I’ve also done some minor things like changing the oil and so on.

The major thing I want to do before going to Spa, though, is to make some aero parts.I hope I manage to get round to it as it’d be really nice to know that it made a difference…

Watch this space…