Well, at least I can now get back to the Spektre! As I think I’ve said a few thousand times I need to get the engine mountings done. If you’ve got a long memory you will remember that I did the one at the top right of the engine and it was time to press on with some similar things.
Birkettastic
Last weekend was the Birkett and we were up again racing in team Eastern Delight (we decided to give it a better (?) name this time). The Birkett is a unique event being, if you don’t know, a 6 hour relay race for teams of up to 6 cars and drivers. In this week’s Autosport Marcus Pye got it just right in his column where he says:
Spectroscopy
You know, Tim, you do come up with some ridiculous names for posts.
Well, so I do. However, in this case it’s a sort of sideways reference to the fact that Jeremy is going to have to change the name of this car due to a clash with another trademarked “Spectre” name.
End of the season
A little vignette of an RGB/750 club paddock:
I took my cordless drill to Mallory, as I always do. I didn’t use it though. However, two other people borrowed it:
- Adrian was having cat problems, again, and used the drill to hack out the remains of yet another expensive waste of money
- Andy borrowed the drill to help him repair the bonnet of an MG Midget that was racing that day, although clearly not in an RGB race.
I don’t know about you, but I think that’s great.
Two car Tim
There’s quite a lot of good photos around of the race at Snetterton. The one shown here was taken by Derek Jones’ Dad at Russell chicane. That’s Tony just behind me, thankfully.
Down to the wire
It was time for another race meeting, this time at Snetterton. I decided not to go testing, although I did spend the test day there with Dan who was out for the first time in his RGB race car.
Creeping forwards
There’s another race meeting coming up so I needed to sort the Fury again. After Silverstone I was concerned that I might have deranged the suspension after narrowly missing a spinning Duncan by escaping over the huge kerb at Becketts. I noticed at the weekend that the F1 people were whinging about Monza having put some huge kerbs in. Serves them right, I reckon.
So, I tipped the Spectre chassis on its side-it’s still light enough to do that-and put the Fury in an accessible position and spent a merry 5 hours checking the suspension alignment, which all seemed to be fine. Hmm, that was a waste of time then.
De-fumigated
After getting grey gunge all over my arms, I seem to have decided that I’m not happy with the POR-15 as a chassis treatment. It didn’t seem to be working as well as when I did the same thing to the Fury after setting that on fire. The difference is that back then I’d just had the chassis shot-blasted and that provides a pretty good key for paint-like stuff. So, I think I’m going to get the chassis powder coated and I phoned a local company, GKL Coatings, that Dan has used for powder coating and they sounded pretty competent so I’ll take the chassis there in a while. However, that means I really need to get everything that I want to do to the chassis done as soon as possible.
Fumigated…
Having now got the front uprights from Jeremy the first job was to take them to bits! So, I took the bearing caps off and hence the hubs and exposed this rather nice looking spidery thing. These uprights are interesting in that they’re essentially a set of parts. The bearing support shaft here is just held at the back of the upright by a big nut. The steering arm, as you can probably see, is also a separate part.
Stand upright at the front!
I’ve finally got the front uprights through from Jeremy, who hadn’t received them from his suppliers for ages. Here’s a photo of one of them, as you can see it’s jolly shiny!
Oddly, I seem to have two discs too, which I didn’t realise that Jeremy was going to supply. They’re not the size that I’m going to use, and have already bought, but I might be able to press them into use as spares, I suppose.