Well, I’ve finally managed to get the car off the trailer and start fixing it in preparation for the next race, on this occasion at Donington.
First thing was all the bits of aluminium at the rear of the car. The impact with the barriers had bent much of this all over the place. The aluminium plate that allowed access to the fuel filler, positioned right in the middle of the rear deck of the tub, had a 90° bend in it after the crash, which makes you realise what happened.
So, I took off quite a few of the bits and hammered them flat again and replaced many of the rivets. I’ll have to do the same to the rear undertray as well. Still it looks a lot better now.
One problem with all this was that I realised that the little breather pipe in the top of the fuel tank had a tiny crack (about 2mm long) in it, as a result of the tank being pushed forward 
into the rear of the car. You can see the pipe in the photo above. I didn’t want to think about trying to weld this up, so I patched it up with some epoxy resin. I’m pretty sure that that should be OK although I shall watch it carefully.
The biggest repair, by far, though was the rear tub. This was even worse than I’d thought to be honest and I spent a lot of time patching it up on the inside to try and make it stiff enough again. To be honest it’s really a real mess and a sensible person would actually buy a new one. However, the quality of the Fisher/BGH sourced stuff is so awful that I couldn’t force myself to buy any more of it. This leaves me in a difficult position really as the time will come when this is beyond repaid and I’ve no idea what I’ll be able to do at that point. I did have a long term plan to try and make some moulds but the problem is as the plug (that is, my current bodywork) gets progressively naffer it’s gets less suitable a source of some moulds.
Still, I ended up putting the absolute minimum of filler on the outside of the bodywork and finally cleaned it all up outside on the drive, as in the photo. I then dragged it inside the garage and resprayed most of it. I had thought that this would actually make it look a bit better but to be honest it probably made it look worse, so I’m not going to show you a photo of it. The other reason is that I forgot to take one.
In summary, I’m going to need a lot of stickers to cover up the really naff bits…
Back to the car itself, I’d thought that the exhaust was getting noisier so thought that it was time to repack it. However, when I got the sidepod off I found what I suspect is the real cause of the noise in that the rear 
silencer support had broken off the tail pipe where I’d welded it a while ago. I suspect that there was a bit of tension in it and the vibration has just got to it. So, I went back to the previous mouting technique of using a bent bit of metal and a clamp to hold it against the tail pipe. That had worked for ages before I decided to make it better by welding this bracket on.
Along the way I did repack the silencer anyway, although when I got the wadding out it really wasn’t in that bad a state. However, by then it seemed prudent to replace it anyway as it’s a bit of a pain to have to take it apart all the time.
With all that done it was time to look at the suspension and realign it. When I measured the rear toe it came to about 20mm of toe-in, which would account for why the car seemed to be crabbing slightly as all of the toe seemed to be in the right rear wheel.
On taking the suspension apart it became obvious why in that the rear upright had bent, again, as had the long piece of ½” studding that I had going through the bushes in the photo. This is a photo of the bottom of the upright and if you look hard you can just about see that the two bushes are no longer aligned with each other.
Still, that’s rather less damage than I’ve done to these uprights in the past, although this one was brand new at the beginning of the season.
With luck when I get this corner back together the rest of the car won’t be too far out. It takes ages measuring it all though.