First thing was to clear all the gravel out of the tunnel, you can see what it was like above. Bear in mind that the car has a complete front and read undertray. That this much gravel got into the tunnel gives you some sort of indication how much there was in the rest of the car. In fact, I took all of the brakes off so as to make sure there weren’t any little bits sitting there waiting to jam up the brakes at an inopportune moment.

The biggest problem, though, looked to be this. I knew something was wrong with this suspension mounting. I’d thought I’d have to take the diff out and then I realised that I could just take the seat back off. As you can see the U-mount is partially torn away from the chassis. In fact, it doesn’t look as if my weld has penetrated too well here.

So, I took the wishbone and everything off, battered it all back into place and patched it up.

I knew that the upright was mullered and I had originally thought that I’d got a spare. However, it turned out that my spare was for the other side of the car. So, I phoned BGH and they said they had exactly one and that they’d send it to me. That it hasn’t turned up yet isn’t worrying me in the slightest…

In the meantime, I thought I’d put the wishbone and everything back in. In the process of doing this I discovered that the wishbone was twisted. It’s essentially flat but when you lay it on a flat surface one corner sticks up by about 20mm. This is probably not a Good Thing. So, swearing slightly, I dug out the jig I made a few years ago and set about making a new one. Luckily I’ve got the various bits of steel and the bushes that  I need. The photo shows it in an early stage of construction. Of course, since I made these originally, I’ve acquired a lathe; have I mentioned this at all? So, things are a bit easier now and I don’t have to traipse up to the wilds of Eloi to use Dan‘s lathe.

In fact, as I write, the upright’s arrived. Phew… So, with luck, I’ll be able to get this all back together in time for the next race. In fact, I’m considering a minor tweak in that I might fit the double-adjustable dampers that I got the other day to the Fury. As I’m doing a test day it might help to see where I can get to and will provide a bit of information to help with the J15 when I finally get the thing on track. I could easily just convert back to the single adjustables though. On that subject I phoned Protech to tell them I hadn’t paid, and they said that as I’d just bought four more dampers from them they were repairing the single adjustable for free. Super service, I’m very very impressed.

As to what caused all this grief, there’s various videos been posted so you can see where I came to grief from many points of view. What’s more, this race is going to feature in a TV programme on Motors TV in a few weeks (there will also be a copy of the programme here). You never know, you might see me in it…

Here’s Al’s video where you can see how I came to grief at Druids. Or, rather, someone else applied the grief to me at about 26 seconds in. It seems that the BTCC is having an effect…

As to the J15, well progress has stalled a bit the last few days. I did make a bit of start getting the front bodywork fitted. In particular I mounted the carbon fibre/epoxy splitter I made on the front of the car, as in the photo.

However, so far this isn’t good enough as the aluminium floor that the splitter is connected to isn’t up to the job. I did make a strap to support the splitter but it allows the rear of the panel to lift which isn’t good enough. I need to think harder how to do this, when the Fury is well again…

I’ve been thinking that I might end up doing all of this season’s RGB races in the Fury. I’ll bust a gut to get the J15 ready for the Birkett though. Especially as that’s going to be on the “Historic GP circuit” this year, which is what was the GP circuit up until this year. Of course, we’ll see the new “Arena” circuit in operation for the upcoming British GP. Pity that it cuts out Bridge though…

First up I took the remains of the shattered exhaust over to Andy’s and we welded in a new cat, as seen here. (I really need to get a TIG welder…) Apparently, the cat I had is one of the earliest batch produced by the company that Andy got them from and they now weld the cat canister into the housing. (If you look hard at the photo you can see where there’s some grinding on the top of the housing, this appears to be the end result of where a hole has been drilled through the housing and then filled with weld material after the cat was inserted.)

This was done because, they say, the original cats had a tendency to move in the housing. It’s just possible that this is what happened to mine, but I’m not convinced. However, it was enough to convince me to just put the cat back in the same place and have another go. What’s more, the suppliers have provided the new cat for free, although they want the remains back.

The photo here shows the cat when looking up the silencer. Contrast this with this before photo and you can see the difference. Whether it stays like this in anyone’s guess.

To try and help it along I’ve booked a day at a rolling road dyno. The people at PDQ come highly recommended by Andy as well some other RGBers, so I’ll take the car there and make sure that the fuelling is good before trying to roast this new cat.

With that done, I’ve repacked the silencer. The wadding that was in the silencer when it arrived from Tony Law was the loose glass fibre stuff. I’ve replaced it with the sheet wadding, as in the photo on the right. This is rather more expensive than the loose stuff but, in my opinion is far superior because:

• it doesn’t irritate my skin; the glass stuff leaves me itching for weeks,
• you can just roll it around the central tube as in the photo and
• it’s much easier to get it packed to a consistent density; it just depends how hard you lean on it as you roll it up.

So that’s now back in and the headers are re-attached on the car. I am, though, going to have to move the exhaust mounting slightly. The way the new cat has been welded in has meant the silencer has moved back by a few millimetres. What’s more, we didn’t quite get the headers/cat/silencer lined up properly so the silencer is in a slightly different position. All I need to do, though is to weld a slightly different tab onto the exhaust mounting.

I’ve also started doing a couple of other things. The oil temperature was slightly too high at the Snetterton test in that it was up at around 120° (the water actually got to nearly 90° as well). This really means that I’m going to have to do what I always meant to do and refit the oil cooler. So, as discussed before, I’m refitting the sandwich plate that I used on the 919 engine. I need to modify the hoses slightly though and I’m in the process of working out how best to do that.

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:

1. 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.
2. 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.

Looking a bit later on and the exhaust looks pretty good, although the header connections needed a bit of brutality to make them line up properly.

As you can see in the photo on the right it’s got a proper sized silencer, which should mean that when the cat material has been pumped down the road (probably about a day) it still silences properly. The tailpipe takes a sharper turn than it used to to exit the sidepod but it should be OK. The collector’s also rather further forward. That means that at least one of the headers has to take a fairly sharp turn. Should be OK though.

If you look hard then just above the silencer you can see the cat. If you look very hard you can see the lambda boss just beyond the cat. The only problem with the boss is that I may not have time to wire up the lambda sensor before this weekend’s trackday. As such I need a bung to stop up the hole. (You can’t use the lambda sensor itself as using it without power applied nadgers the sensor.) However, that’ s no big deal and I ought to be able to pick up a bung from Chris as Trigger Wheels tomorrow on my way back home.

As usual I’m very  happy with the work that TLE have done. What’s more, the price is pretty keen. In fact, it’s less than half what I was quoted by someone more local a while ago. What’s more, that would have been done by welding together a bunch of mandrel bends whereas this is bespoke tube bent to fit.

There’s not too much to talk about really as the car’s gone away. However, a few people were nagging me to update the site so here I am again.

As discussed, I took the car up to Tony Law Exhausts last Wednesday. The weather, as most readers will know if you’re not reading up on history, was horrible but Wednesday was a bit of a break in the blizzard conditions. When I left it, the chaps there were a a bit vacant about how long it was going to be. I impressed on them about the track day that’s coming up on Saturday!!!! I know other people are feeling a bit pressured, such as Adrian, but at least he’s got a car in his garage.

In the meantime, I tidied up the garage which you can’t really tell from the photo here as it still looks dead messy. It is really, it’s just better than it was.

I phoned TLE again today and the car’s going to be ready tomorrow. I’ll probably leave it till Wednesday to go up there though. Once I get it back, I’ve got a long list of things to do to the car before taking it to Snetterton. This includes:

• Bunging up the hole round the airbox
• Refitting the rear undertray.
• Fitting the front undertray. This is not trivial as I’m going to have to cut a hole in it to clear a bit of the CBR1000′s sump.
• Refitting the electronics (data logger, display) and recalibrating for the new engine. (Hmmm, I wonder what the rev limit is for the CBR1000?
• Check all the suspension. It’s been sitting there all winter not doing anything and I probably ought to at least make that nothing’s fallen to bits,
• Adjust the new brake master cylinder pushrods. In fact, I probably ought to bleed the brakes again.
• Check the oil in the diff, somethign else that I’ve just ignored all winter.

I just hope that the weather is going to be OK this weekend. I guess I wouldn’t mind that much if it was raining, but ice and snow wouldn’t be fun.

Hence, eeeek!!!

There’s a bit of progress to talk about here, luckily. First up is that I installed the power commander just at the side of the battery, as shown here. I also had a play with the mapping software which looks pretty cool and fairly easy  to use. Essentially you attach a laptop to the power commander with a USB cable and it gives you a 2D set of sites (the dimensions being throttle position and RPM) in each of which you can adjust the fueling above or below the standard setting dished out by the Honda ECU, which is just the other side of the battery. You can also get an ignition module for the Power Commander but that is specially forbidden by the formula regs. It’d be interesting to try it though.

In the immediate term I’ll just leave the standard power commander map in there, which Andy reckons is pretty good. If I get a chance at some point I’ll take the car along to a rolling road and get it specifically mapped. I’ve also bought a wideband lambda sensor which is one of these which I bought from my good friends at Trigger Wheels. Once I get the chance to get the sensor plumbed into the DL1 I’ll be able to plot AFR (air fuel ratio) after I’ve finished a run. That should show me a bit of what’s going on.

I’ve refitted the bonnet, and in the process cut a big hole to clear the engine and airbox as you can see. This shows the view from low down and  you can see that the inlet trumpets are just about under the bonnet, although of course like this there isn’t any airbox. When I cut this hole my intention was to make the airbox stick out through the bonnet which I’d trim to be snug around the airbox.

However, I have now got the airbox and I’ve realised that this was a daft idea. Here’s the airbox in position and looking, if I’m honest, rather over-imposing.

The notion of making a snug fit with the bonnet would work if the bonnet just lifted off and on but the Fury bonnet is, of course, hinged and you just can’t get a very snug fit due to the angled approach. Hence, I’ve cut a rather larger hole here. At the moment the approach is, unless I have a brighter idea, to make a plate that goes around the airbox and attaches (after the bonnet is in place) to the bonnet with some Dzus fasteners. If nothing else, this should do for the upcoming trackday, I may re-address the situation after that. Of course, with the plate in position actually opening and closing the bonnet will be a bit of a pain. Perhaps I should just make a hump after all?

That can wait though, as I might want to do something else. I must admit that I nagged Andy unmercifully until I got he airbox but I’m not totally happy with the aerodynamic aspects of the ‘box. I’m pretty sure I know how to make one that’d work better than this. (For those interested, it’s all to do with that nice Mr Bernoulli, he said mysteriously.)

If I get the chance I may well have a go, later in the season, at making something else for which a bonnet hump might be more appropriate. In the meantime, though, I’ll stick with this.

One of the big problems with the CBR1000 is the second set of injectors which, in this case, are mounted in the top of the upper half of the airbox. This means that getting the fuel rail connected is rather a pain, as is getting the wiring to the injectors. Here you can see the secondary fuel rail and the wiring in the top half of the airbox.

Of course, this is all very well, but that airbox is in the way of one’s forward vision. So here’s a couple of photos of what it looks like from the driver’s seat. First impressions are that it’s actually OK. One observation, though, is that Andy’s airbox has a cover that goes over the top set of injectors. Frankly, there’s loads of wasted space up here, as can be seen in the second of the viewpoint photos where I’ve taken off the cover. However, I’ll leave it as it is for now. I can always experiment when at Snetterton to see what it’s actually like on the track.

(That is, for now I’ll just gaffer tape the injector cover in place!)

I’ve said several times that I was working towards being able to start the engine and I finally got there this weekend. After considerable prevarication I finally ran out of displacement activity and set up the camera to take that photo on the right. Then I pressed the starter button and, right on cue, it started! If you click on the photo you’re quite likely to be able to watch a little low-quality video of the excitement. If you look hard you can see the blue flames coming out of the exhaust ports. As you can probably tell, I’m wearing ear defenders as I’m always very careful about my hearing after a mis-spent youth. Hence, I don’t really know loud it really was. But, I can tell it was actually LOUD.

The amazing thing is how easily it started after all the faffing about. I spoke to Andy about it later and he said that this was normal for the CBR1000. After all the fiddling about that was necessary with the CBR900 it was a nice change. Mind you, I’ve since realised a couple of things I should have tried. First of all, I should have checked that it actually responded  to the throttle. I’m not sure I mentioned it but I installed the throttle cable a couple of days ago. As is normal for me I used some expensive MTB brake cable bought from Wiggle. I managed to patch a “noodle tube” into one of the adapters that connected the original bike twistgrip cables to the throttle bodies. That makes a nicely firm mounting for the cable.

Secondly, I should have tried connecting up the Power Commander and running it like that. I’ll probably try this in the next day or so just to check that the Power Commander is OK. In fact, I really ought to get it out of its box to see if it actually works.

I did, though, have the logger connected and on the left you can see the trace from one of the runs. One difference I did notice from the CBR900 is that it seems as though pulling starting current out of the battery has a more deleterious effect that it did before. This is the reason why this trace starts here: pressing the starter button actually stopped and restarted the logger. I had the in-car video running as well. (I haven’t included a sample here because you can’t see the blue flames!) and it seemed to have a horrible effect on that as well. However, you can see that the RPM settled down quite quickly to about 1800 rpm and the oil pressure shot up quickly to about 74psi. That’s pretty much on spec so that’s good. Of course, the oil’s cold at the moment but it’s a good sign.

With that done, I feel as if I’m on the downhill part of the process. As such, it’s probably time to start re-attaching the bodywork. So, I retrieved it from the shed where it’s spent the winter and put the left hand sidepod back on (although, of course, that’ll have to come off again when the exhaust is made). For some reason this stage is very important as the car suddenly starts to look like a car again.

While doing this I was thinking about all those things that I would normally have done to the car, such as checking the suspension alignment, that’s probably going to have to wait until after the Snetterton test. I have, though, started a process of reducing the weight of the car by reducing the weight of the fat bastard that’s driving it. There’s a long way to go though. Mind you, if Anthea can reduce her weight so dramatically then so can I.

The next problem is fitting the bonnet which is always a real faff without any help. I don’t feel as though I can ask Anthea because although she’s recovered well from the bypass she’s taking a long time to recover from the physical effects of the operation and in particular it’s hard for her to lift things. So, I’m going to have to struggle. However, the good news on the bonnet is that Andy’s new airbox has apparently seen the light of day. With luck I can get one this week. With that done I’ll be able to make an appropriately sized hole in the bonnet. In readiness for  that I’ve taken off the rather neat little aluminium hump that I made at about this time last year for the CBR900. Seems an age ago really…

Mind you, as I write this, it occurs to me that I ought to junk the bit of fuel that I’ve got in the tank and put some nice fresh stuff in. As is well known, unleaded fuel that’s been hanging around over the winter isn’t the best of things.

However, before I can do anything about this I need to wire in the secondary injectors, even though I still don’t have an airbox in which to mount them. I spoke to Andy the other day about his airbox and it’s still not available. I’m in two minds about this. On the one hand I could just wait but I’m beginning to think that I’d be better building a big aluminium box and sticking a cone filter on the front of it such as one of these, as available from Merlin. At least doing something myself would mean I could get on and do it.

In the meantime though, I needed to wire up the injectors which I’ve now done, as in the photo above. That should have meant that I could just turn on the ignition and the pump would start up and shut down; as I think I’ve mentioned this is a good sign that the ECU thinks the world is a nice place.

However, nothing happened. I could have started rooting around the new wiring and checked it all, but I decided to do something I’ve been meaning to do for a while which is to read the fault codes out of the ECU. This is done by shorting two wires on the “Data Link Connector” and looking at the FI light which is supposed to flash in a way to tell you what the codes are. I did this and it worked a dream. It told me that I’d got a duff EGCV, HESD and primary injector 1 was faulty. The first two are entirely correct as they’re not here. The last one, though, was a surprise but also correct because some muppet, I can’t think who, had taken that connector off and not reconnected it.So, one up to the Honda ECU, I reckon. Now I know how to do that it could be useful. I also managed to delete the fault codes and for a while it reckoned that everything was perfect. Until it noticed the missing EGCV and HESD, of course.

On the subject of electronics I’ve been think about a couple of things. First of all, I want to think about where I’m going to put the Power Commander. Come to that I really need to at least read the documentation as there’s bound to be a bit of a learning curve coming to terms with that. Once I do put the power commander in it’d be nice to have some way of knowing how good the combustion is. The normal way to do this is to get a wideband λ sensor installed. With one of those I could feed its output into the data logger and get a log of the air/fuel ratio during a race. Luckily, I’ve know a chap who sells widebands and he pointed me at his web site which includes the Techedge 2J1 which looks just the thing. I’ll talk to him about getting one for me. Thinking about this reminded me that when I get the exhaust system made I ought to get a λ boss welded into it, to make fitting the sensor easy.

Hmm, the expense is all mounting up. Even more so because I’ve been thinking about buying a HANS device. They’re still alarmingly expensive though.

I’m now at the point where I’m doing the last bits of putting the car back together. I actually put the tunnel panels back in today which means that it looks rather more like a car. I might even dig the bodywork out of the shed this weekend. At least once I do that I’ll get an idea how big a hole I’m going to need in the bonnet and how much the engine is going to stick out

First thing here is that I finally got the banjo bolt for the clutch slave cylinder. This is wierd size (M10x1.25) and it took a while to find a supplier who actually had one.

Still it’s in now as you can just about see in the photo. (At the top end of the silvery braided hose.)