Time for a wee bit more about the J15, although I’m going to have to turn my mind back to the Fury soon in the run-up to the long, long, trip to Pembrey. Before that though, here’s nice photo that Dave Hackett took at Cadwell.
Back to the J15 and there’s not really that much to report. To be honest I’ve been struggling with fitting the bodywork. The standard way to fit the front and rear parts of the bodywork is with some hinges, in the same sort of way that the Fury bonnet is attached. However, for the front bodywork at least, there’s a couple of problems with this. One is that the hinge frame conflicts with where I’ve got the radiator. And, I want the radiator to be here because in the long term I might want to duct it out of the top of the bodywork and that requires the radiator to sit at a particular angle. More 
importantly, I’m pretty sure that I’m going to need a substantial splitter in order to optimise the front end grip, especially in the faster corners. On the Fury I mounted the splitter on the bottom of the bonnet. However, that means you can’t really open the bonnet easily anyway, as the splitter bashes into the ground. So, I decided a while ago to make the front bodywork just lift off; unlike the Fury bonnet it’s relatively easy to lift because it’s rather smaller.
You may remember that I made a carbon-fibre panel for a splitter. However, originally I couldn’t make that stiff enough and I’ve been experimenting with that old thing, a sheet of ply! You can see a big lump attached to the car above. With the ply it was clear that I still wasn’t going to be able to make it stiff enough so I relented on what I’d been trying to avoid and made the frame that you can see in the photo above. This stiffens everything up nicely. So much so that I think I’ll try the CF panel again. If that does work then at least I’ll have a spare. One of the problems with splitters is that if you go off track then they tend to 
act like gardening implements and very rapidly get spectacularly bashed up.
That still meant, though, that I hadn’t actually got the bodywork attached. Eventually, I did it in the manner that you can nearly see in the next photo. I’m not sure you can see it very easily, but there’s a couple of stretchy rubber hooks (like these) holding the bodywork down onto the splitter. Actually, to be honest, it’s being held down onto a couple of blocks of a wood that are providing the correct spacing. (Once I’m in a woodworking mood, it seems to stay…)
I’m not totally happy with this, to be honest, because if the splitter gets damaged (see above) then the bodywork might not be too stable either. My original intention was to put a couple of “towers” above the front corners of the chassis and made some pads on the top of those for the bodywork to rest on. The more I looked at it, though, the chunkier it bacame and the less necessary it seemed. I’ll think about it though.
The rear of this bodywork is, at the moment retained just by a couple of springs. However, I’ll probably need to use a couple of bonnet pins to stop it lifting at speed.
All the same, the car does now look rather more like a car. I’d like to get the rear bodywork mounted soon, as well. Just to make it feel as if I’ve done something.