Thud… Thud…

That’s the unmistakable sound of me banging my head into a brick wall. At least that’s what I feel as if I should be doing after last weekend at Snetterton. To say the weekend was frustrating doesn’t come anywhere near it.

We got there last on the Thursday night and parked up in the area of the paddock nominally reserved for RGB. Mind you, we appeared to be a in Stock Hatch city. I was testing on the Friday and, apart from worries about the weather, looking forward to it all.

In a nutshell, testing was very successful. There was the normal problem of there being a stack of Stock Hatches on the circuit to dodge between all the time. (But, then, they’ve paid their testing fees too.) There were also a couple of huge GT3 Porshes which were hugely quick down the straights and mobile chicanes in the corners. Luckily you could tell when they were arriving behind you as the stick of brake pad material preceeded them. Heaven knows what they weight but they clearly take a lot of stopping. However, I was comfortably lapping in about 1:18.3 even on some rather old testing tyres and as such it seemed to bode well for the following day. In fact, I called the test session short and sold the last session to Andy Grant who probably needed it more than me and drove the car back to the motorhome.

Whilst out on the circuit I had noticed a bit of a vibration and didn’t remember that that sort of vibration is always caused by the bolts in the diff working loose, which they seem to do all the time. I’m going to have a real go at these, though, with the aid of some stud lock and I’ll probably  lock wire them too. Surely that’ll stop this happening all the time?

I remembered to tighten these up while I was in the scrutineering queue the following morning, having been prompted by discovering that the reverse wasn’t working properly. This time, at least, my tiny mind remembered that the diff bolts were the cause of this too. Until this day, the car had worked faultlessly. However, when trying to start it on the Saturday morning it had been surprisingly reluctant to start. Odd that, because every other time I’d tried to start it it had just burst into life when I’d pressed the starter, even without having to lean in and prod the throttle pedal. I didn’t think much about this at the time but as it turned out I probably should have done. However, I’d done essentially nothing to the car since I finished the last test session, just changed the tyres, checked the fluids and washed it (!).

Down in the assembly area I was second in the queue and set fair, so I thought, for a good time. In fact, I was more nervous than I’d been for ages, probably with the anticipation. When we went out I did a slow lap and the car didn’t seem quite as alive as it had the previous day. However, I didn’t think much about it and went for it as I crossed the start/finish line at the end of the out lap.

Oh dear.

It just wasn’t pulling properly. After a couple of laps I pulled into the pits and then realised (well, Roger told me) that I needed to get my three laps in. In fact, I had got them in as I’d forgotten to count the out lap. All the same, the car was getting worse and worse and this time around it was clearly not going to get back to the pits and so I pulled in at the end of the Revett straight. The engine just wasn’t revving properly and, so I was told later, there were gouts of flame coming out of the exhaust.

That, in a nutshell, was the end of my weekend. My best lap in qualifying was a pathetic 1:26; good enough for the back of the grid. I then proceeded to try and find out what was wrong with the car which consumed every waking second for the next two days. In that time I discovered that it was running wildly rich, which would account for the lack of power and the flames. During testing the air/fuel ratio at WOT down the Revett straight had been spot on at 13.8. At the same point on the track in my fastest qualifying lap it had been11.0 and dipped to 10.0 on the lap when I gave up.

Of course, finding out what the problem was proved impossible. Duing the search I:

• refitted the airbox as the scrutineer had leaned on it and dislodged it,
• cleaned out the cold-start enrichment mechanism,
• replaced the fuel pump,
• changed the Inlet Air Temperature (IAT) sender,
• changed the Engine Coolant Temperature (ECT) sender,
• changed the Cam position sensor,
• changed the Crank position sensor,
• changed the ECU,
• changed the secondary injectors,
• changed the Manifold Absolute Pressure (MAP) sensor,
• changed the spark plugs,
• changed the stick coils,
• removed the Power Commander,
• changed the battery,
• pored over the wiring and
• battered my head against the wall of the motorhome.

And all to no avail. I kept thinking I’d found something but it never turned out to be the case.

Eventually, I packed it all up and went home whereupon I got the perhaps inevitable migraine attack and retired to bed…

This leaves me in some confusion as to what to do next. I think I’m going to try replacing the wiring loom. Andy Bates was hugely helpful throughout this process and left me with essentially a spare set of engine management components and I’m going to sacrifice another loom to try and make sure that there isn’t some buried fault in the current one.

To call all this frustrating is an understatement…