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.
The other thing I really needed to do was to put a bit of heat-shielding in the sidepod. Measurements of the cat temperature at the recent track day were up in the 300-400°C range and the GRP was getting a bit on the floppy side. So, I put in a certain amount of aluminised glass heat shield, as in the photo. This is just held in place with some of the inevitable PU adhesive. I hope that air draft doesn’t peel it off, I seem to remember that that’s happened in the past.
With that done I’ve worked through a long list of various preparation jobs. Most significant really was the incredibly tedious one of checking all the suspension settings. The biggest change here is that as the new engine sits a little lower than the old one (a deliberate decision as it’s so tall) I needed to raise the ride height to get back within RGB rules. I must admit that it’s a bit higher than I would like and I’m wondering about raising the engine slightly and compensating by removing some of the wasted lump at the top of the airbox, as I’ve discussed before. I did deliberately put the engine low as it’s much easier to raise it than it is to lower it. The former can be done with spacers but the latter requires new mountings to be fabricated.
With that done I checked the toe and camber all round and also made sure that the rear wheels were point straight forwards. All this is fairly easy to do, it’s just that it’s become monumentally tedious because of the number of times that I’ve done it!
Unfortunately, the cam7 corner weight scales seem to have died so I couldn’t do that. That’s a shame as I was interested to see what the car weighed. The car’s probably heavier than it was last year but the chap in the driver’s seat is actually about 9kg lighter.
With all that done then there isn’t that much left before the test and race. I’m getting really quite excited!