Building, racing, crashing and setting fire to various kit cars…
…whatever one of those is. (Actually, it turns out that it’s a small explosive device.) It’s what the Birkett turned out to be.
I’d got myself all ready well in advance, here’s the car sitting on the trailer and, after a morning lecturing to students. I jumped on the train, zoomed down to Cambridge and drove to Silverstone. There, miracles of miracles (they must have got some new security guards) we got in easily and parked up for the night.
As discussed, I bit the bullet and remade some of the suspension components. First up is the rather short rear upper wishbone, as in the photo. It’s the iridescent white component. (I’ve got fed up using POR-15 which always goes a weird non-grey colour so I’ve decided to start spraying things like with rattle cans. As, oddly, Halfords don’t sell rattle cans for grey cars I settled on white as a decent light colour. Black would be nice but I’m paranoid about being able to see cracks appearing.
Yet again, too long since the last update. I’ve just been moving forwards very slowly on many fronts so this is a sort of catching-up post.
I finished the oil cooler duct, as seen in the photo. I hope it’s going to have some effect, if it doesn’t I’ve got a couple of ideas as to how to persuade more air to do into it. It’s not particularly pretty though.
Since the last meeting at Brands I’ve had a collection of things to do. You will remember that I said I’d broken my finger in the first race at the weekend. So I did but it’s really rather minor. I did manage to work out a way of continuing to work on the car which involved modifying a pair of work gloves by cutting two of the fingers apart and gaffer taping them together. I was quite pleased with that, although the hospital have now unstrapped my finger and it’s floating free so these fetching gloves are now looking for a new home.
It’s getting closer and closer to the first race, although I’ve got one more test before then, but I’m thinking more and more about the race. (That is, I’m getting very nervous!)
So, I’ve just been doing a few bits and pieces really. First up was fixing a small problem. I found at the recent Snetterton test that when I climbed into the car I tended to whack my knee on the connector on the bottom of the Palm, breaking it! So, I’ve put a little extension on the bottom of the mounting plate to hopefully support it a bit better.
