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…

In fact, this was at the end of a rather odd weekend. Tom is going away from the UK to live and work in Hong Kong for the foreseeable future. I was a bit discombobulated when he left home to go to Durham University but this is a bit odder than that…

So, discombobulation aside, how to did I get here. Well, back Β in the Dark Ages I was building the airbox snorkel, you will doubtless remember. I did say that I wanted to shroud the oil cooler slightly, which I did with the aid of a bent bit of aluminium. This is held on, as you can doubtless tell, by some tiewraps. Look, if it’s good enough for holding on bits of F1 cars then it’s good enough for this.

With that the car was back to the point where I’m now really tarting it up and getting ready to test and race it. As you can tell from the photo at the top I’ve got the usual race number, which commemorates my age; odd that I’ve been that age for some years now. But, these things happen.

One thing I’ve been meaning to experiment with for ages is some sort of “diffuser” panel. The quotes are there because we can’t build a proper diffuser in RGB because of the rules limited aerodynamic development. However many people have claimed some effect from a bit of a rising panel at the rear of the underside so I decided to make something, and ended up with the thing in the photo.

As you can tell, this provides a truly superb way of bashing in the shins of other RGBers, having wreaked havoc on people last year with the rear spoilers. It’s made from a carbon/glass composite with some bits of coremat to stiffen it up a bit. Mind you, I do keep wondering why I didn’t just make it out of aluminium. (In fact, I keep musing about this pipedream of making some complete bodywork, of a rather different shape, out of ultra light aluminium. I reckon with the right curves and lots of rivets it’d be very stiff. I’m thinking of a sort of CanAm shape if that means anything to you. The J15 body isn’t half a sexy shape but the bodywork is far too heavy.)

With all that done the only things, really, are setting up the car and seeing if it works. Hence, the trip onto the drive. I didn’t actually drive it there as I hadn’t even started the suspension setup at the time. I’m most of the way through a first run through of this now. Tomorrow I’ll do some corner weghting and we’ll see where we are.

Once that’s all done I couldn’t half do with some testing. I’ve got a trip to the rolling road sorted, but trying the car on track as well would be rather sensible. Heaven knows how I’ll find the time though.

I also need to start getting race ready: sorting the trailer out, making sure the bus works, sorting out the race spares and tools. That’ll take me weeks. Last thing, though, is that I tidied up the garage while the car was out of the garage idling on the drive (I was checking that the cooling worked properly). I realised that I still had a perfectly good CBR1000RR07 sitting there complete with one of Andy’s expensive billet sumps and a Power Commander. Time to put them on eBay, I suspect. I reckon I could make enough to buy some better set up gear; I keep wondering about proper cornerweight scales and some toe alignment gauges…

4 thoughts on “Hitting the ground dawdling”

  1. Good luck for the new season Tim. I hope it all stays together for you and you are more at the pointy end of the grid. I’m just finishing off the Phoenix for the coming Sprint season…we shall see what 340BHP of Supercharged Zetec goes like πŸ™‚

  2. Hope that undertray is fixed on nice and strong, we dont want another flappy bit of GRP hanging out the back of another RGB car πŸ˜‰

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