Nearly time for another race

Well, I’m finally getting there.

I finished off unbending the right rear and put it all back together again. I keep thinking I ought to get some new hubnuts one day. They’re great big nylocs and are the original ones I got from the the Kit Car Workshop back in 2004. In fact, the originals that they supplied were all bashed up and I got some new ones from them. These have now been on and off so many times that they could really do with replacing.

Still, I put it back together and spent ages and ages realigning the rear suspension. All the time hoping that I wasn’t going to have to fiddle with the front end too much; although that’s actually rather less tedious than the rear. Every time I do this I wish I’d built in toe and camber adjuster ladders into the wishbones. Being able to adjust things without taking it all half to bits would be incredibly useful. Perhaps I ought to put that on the back burner.

Eventually, though, it was all done and the car pushed back and forth easily again. (Getting the toe right makes a huge difference to this.) I’m sure that the steering wheel isn’t properly central, but the only way to adjust that seems to be to drive the thing around the paddock a couple of times and adjust the track rod ends back and forth.

Finally I refitted the rear tub. I had to do a couple of additional patches, such as the little ally plates that you can see the bonnet pin on in the photo above. But, it doesn’t look too bad. (Actually, it looks awful. But, it’s a race car…) Refitting the rear undertray was, though, a real pain in the bum. Everything had moved, not surprisingly, and I found that many of the Dzus fastener springs had been pulled flat by the force on the bodywork. So, I ended up replacing a lot of them. If I have to take the undertray off at a race circuit I may well have to leave it off as it’s going to be really tedious to change it.

Along the way I had a look at the gearchange. I’d been aware in the second race at Cadwell that the gearchange felt different somehow, as if the levers were a different position with respect to the steering wheel. I spent some time looking for the problem, and not finding it, before it dawned on me that the steering wheel was bent. I must have done this by wrenching the wheel on the way into the wall at Cadwell. It’s wierd because I’ve looked at the video several times and it doesn’t look as though I do much in the way of wrenching. However, I clearly did.

I’ll buy a new wheel, I think. However, before the next race at Donington I just hammered the old one flat!

Part of the preparation for the next race was that I wanted to tweak the jetting on the carbs. Hopefully it’ll be either better or no worse. If it’s actually worse then I’ll have to change everything back again. I wish the Honda carbs were more like things like Weber DCOEs. You can change the jets on those in a couple of minutes without taking anything off the engine. Getting at the Honda ones is really tricky, made even more difficult by the airbox.

When I did take the airbox off I found quite a lot of water in the bottom of it. (At first I thought it was petrol.) I suppose this was pumped in by the inlet duct in the wet qualifying at Cadwell and never evaporated. I suppose that I ought to check this at every race or so.