Building, racing, crashing race cars with the 750 Motor Club
As seems usual these days, I start with an apology. Since the last post I’ve been racing at both Cadwell and Doningon. It’s the usual excuse, I’ve just been too busy, although I did spend a welcome weekend tramping around the Peak District. All the same, despite the tardiness, I did go to Cadwell and Donington and completed four races without major mishap.
Wasn’t quick enough though…
Yet again, and extremely tiresomely, it’s time to set the car up for another race meeting. For some time now, I’ve been thinking about making it possible to mount a setup frame on the car, much like the one described in the Pashley book. Essentially this allows you to construct a rectangle around the car from which to take measurements to the wheels.
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…
It’s definitely the finishing straight now, barring some horrific problem. First up is that I finished re-installing the transmission. As a consequence of careful design and planning, cough, it all fitted fine and will hopefully work OK.
Luckily, the gearchange lever on the ’08 engine is in almost exactly the same position as on the ’07 engine so no change was necessary here. You can see my super-long gearchange cable snaking around the engine in the photo here.
Well, I finally got he J15 on a race track! I took it to a test day on the Snetterton 300 circuit a couple of days ago.
This is a new layout for Snetterton so it was a new circuit to learn as well as a new car.
I went to Mackay’s, Cambridge’s best shop, and bought the requisite 32mm socket and with that I managed to tighten up the hub nuts. Odd that the nuts seem to have gone on so far that I can’t stake them. Perhaps they ought to have a great thick washer under them like the Sierra ones on the back of the Fury had?
As discussed in the previous post in this apparently never-ending lurch through a tale of cock-ups and curiosities I had to modify the front suspension. So, I cut off the little “ears” that I’d welded onto the front spring mountings an eon or two ago.
This was actually spectacularly difficult to do and I only managed it with the aid of a cutting disc in a Dremel and going very slowly. You can just about see in the photo where they were.
Well, and it was all going so swimmingly. So much so that I finished off putting the roundel on the front.
After that it was really only arranging to point the wheels in the right direction. In order to do that I installed fake Tim, a collection of bags of sand, in the driver’s seat and set about starting the setup, which was going to take rather a while on this completely unaligned chassis.