Well, the short news is that I did make the trackday at Snetterton.
The long news is a bit more traumatic. In fact, at one point I’d decided that I was torturing myself unnecessarily and it’d be more productive to go for a sleep.
Friday: Cambridge
However, back to the beginning. I started the final push, having got the car back with its exhaust by fitting the system properly along with all the alarmingly expensive gaskets. (And exhaust header gasket is a mere £5-92 plus VAT! That’s each. It was quite tricky fitting the headers and I ended up squashing together the pipework with a vice to get the spacing correct. Even so it was quite hard to get the gaskets in the right place.
Having not had the time to go up to Chris’s for a lambda bung I decided to wire in the controller and use the lambda sensor itself. The tricky bit was finding the best source for the power and tapping into the appropriate bit of the loom.
With that done I powered up the engine. Two things were immediatedly obvious:
- It smoked like mad. That wasn’t really surprising given the bits of grease that I’d used to make the thing fit together properly.
- The exhaust headers were blowing like mad. In fact cylinders 1, 3 and 4 were all puffing away. That, to put mildly, was a bit disappointing.
So, I took the exhaust system apart again. On inspection of the gaskets it was clear what was wrong in that the exhaust port adapters I bought from Andy have a design “feature” that means 
that the adapter can “tip over” slightly and dig into the wrong part of the gasket. You can see this quite clearly in the close up photo of one of the gaskets, lovingly photographed on my desk. As you can see this port was leaking from the top of the gasket on account of the adapter completely missing the copper part of the gasket.
So, I replaced the worst offenders (I must be keeping Lings in business) with the two spares that I had and bolted it all up again. This time I made sure that everything was tightened up squarely by slowingly increasing the torque applied to all of the bolts. (The nuts are the same M7 unobtanium devices used on the CBR900 engine.)
Thankfully, this time it worked OK and the car didn’t sound like an asthmatic Morris Minor any more. I really need to replace all the gaskets though.
In that condition I left it a while and the next problem them reared its really rather ugly head. The car boiled over all of a sudden dumping a lot of expensive coolant all over the floor. That as a bit of a surprise. The CBR900 had always been really easy to get the cooling system working properly and it seemed as though the CBR1000 wasn’t as easy. In particular, the CBR900 had a bleed pipe connected to the top of the thermostat housing. The CBR1000 doesn’t have this and it seems as though it makes it much harder to get any air locks out of the system.
So, I then spent most of the Friday afternoon repeatedly heating the car, jacking up one end or the other, cracking pipes open in a long drawn out process of trying to find out what was the problem. Finally, it dawned on my tiny mind that one of the problems was that the radiator cap was faulty. I then realised that I’d wondered about this last season when I’d noticed that some coolant had escaped. Luckily a trip to Halfords turned up a suitable spare one. I think I’ll go back and buy another one for the spares kit.
With that done I was now able to let the car idle and the temperature got up to 95 or so and then the fan would cut in and lower it. I’m still driving the fan with the switch that’s in the radiator rather than using the output from the ECU. I suppose I might experiment with that later in the year.
I then did a final few things, like refitting the front undertray. I had planned on refitting the rear one too but as it fouls slightly on the fuel pump I’ll have to sort that later. With that done, we packed everything up and set off for Snetterton at, ooooh, 2350 in the evening. Not quite the early start I’d planned.
Saturday: Snetterton
We got to Snetterton at about 0100. On the way it had got rather cold. We drove into the paddock and I got out to see which garage we’d got (Bookatrack put names on the door) and promptly fell over. Apparently they’d just had a shower which had immediately frozen and left the surface of the paddock like a complete ice rink. However, we found the right place and parked up. I took the car off the trailer and pushed it into the garage. That sounds easy but as I had to push it up a 0.5° slope on a skating rink it was quite tricky.
And so to bed.
I got up at 0700 and if anything it was icier now. However the sun was coming up and the sky was mostly blue so there seemed a good chance that at worst it’d just be wet rather than lethal.
The big issue first of all was whether the cooling system would work. First signs were not good in that on this day, unlike the previous one, the engine wouldn’t sit idling with the fan cutting in and out. It just got hotter and hotter. To be fair, I may not have waited long enough for the temperature to come down but I didn’t want to risk it too much. The crucial test would be whether the car would work when driving around the paddock as that would be pushing air through the radiator like it does on the circuit. As the day was so cold then it was an ideal situation for cooling.
So, I took the car for its inaugural run with the new engine. This was the absolute first time that it had moved under CBR100o power. Normally I’d at least have driven it onto the drive but there hadn’t been a chance this time. First impressions were good in that the clutch worked really smoothly. Once at speed—I must have got it up to 20 mph in the paddock—it still seemed to be OK. I then had the car noise tested, which involved sitting idling, and running the car at 8000 RPM which pushed the temperature up to 80 or so. Once there and back to trundling around the paddock the temperature did start to come down so that was a good sign that going out on the circuit was sensible. The noise test came out at 96 dbA so that was good too. Mind you, once the catalyst has scattered out of the system and some of the silencer wadding’s solidified I guess it’ll be different.
This does mean that I don’t know why the fan isn’t cooling well enough. It may just be that the fan isn’t big enough for the job. Or perhaps there’s still an airlock hidden somewhere?
With that there was nothing much else to be done than to drive the car out on the circuit. So, I did so.
In fact, I zoomed around the whole day and enjoyed it immensely. The morning was very slippy although that was probably useful to get used to the car. Later in the day it dryed out and the track was quite nice. I suspect that on a hot day it’d grip rather better (especially for those of us on last year’s tyres) but this was a nice way to get into the newly engined car.
In summary, the thing’s alarmingly quick. The engine seems to pull like a train from just about any place in the power band and just keeps going. Nicely, it’s geared much more sensibly. Even though taking it fairly sensibly I was just a smidgeon shy of 130 mph at the end of the straight in 6th gear and with the shift light flashing at me. I’ve set this to 11,500 rpm at the moment although it’s not too clear where it should be. Coming out of the Russell chicane past the pits the thing was up to 6th gear in no time at all and made a most fantastic noise. At least, that’s the way it seemed to me. Reports from the pitwall concurred though.
It was clear how much more power there was. In particular going round Riches I found that if I braked and turned in in 4th gear then just flooring the loud pedal produced loads of wheel spin which needed some considerably control. That was very different in the class C car where I could essentially use full throttle all the time.
What was rather nice is that the power doesn’t seem to come in with a huge bang. I’d worried that the slightest twitch on the throttle would have the back end out and bad things happening. To be honest, the car seemed about as slideable and chuckable as the class C car was.
The other revelation is the gearbox which is astounding quick and precise. I didn’t come within a mile of missing any change all day.
The only fly in the ointment was the gearchange. Ever since I made the paddle shift the connection between gear paddles and the transfer rod has been made by a crank that was just clamped around the transfer rod. This rod is made out of bearing shaft which appears to be Silver Kryptonite or something (I’ve only ever managed to cut it with a grinding wheel). I was always surprised that just clamping the cranks to the rod worked but it seemed to so why change it, especially as it meant that things were readily adjustable. However, today it started slipping round the shaft. I repeatedly readjusted it to no avail. Later in the day I made it work slightly better by struggling with a file to mark the rod up in some way. I suspect that that’s what I’m going to have to do. That is, I’ll have to knurl the rod slightly to make it bind on the (aluminiun) crank slightly.
So, it works. All I need to do now is do a long, long list of things before the first race in a month’s time.