Luckily, the gearchange lever on the ’08 engine is in almost exactly the same position as on the ’07 engine so no change was necessary here. You can see my super-long gearchange cable snaking around the engine in the photo here.

So, it was time to start up the engine. As usual this took me some time to work up to but after faffing around for rather too long I put my ear defenders on (there’s no exhaust, remember?) and pressed the start switch. Gratifyingly, the engine burst into life with pretty blue flames blasting out of the exhaust ports. What’s more, later examination of the data logs showed that the oil pressure had come up OK (you can see the reflected light from the oil pressure lights on the video of this momentous occurrence below) as also did the battery voltage meaning the charging system was working.

So, that was gratifying! What’s more, the neighbours didn’t complain even though the noise must have been horrendous.

Along the way while doing all this I’ve been sorting the car for the next race. So at about this point I got distracted by the rear brakes. So, I took a few minutes out to deglaze them and remove the little lips that appear on the outer edges of the pads, as you can see. I think the rear brakes of the J15 are wearing more than the equivalent ones on the Fury did, which is what you’d expect with the modified weight distribution.

One of the reasons I was looking at the brakes was because I was adding a bit of heat insulation to the handbrake cables which had suffered slightly. On the way past I noticed the pads and thought they’d appreciate a trip into the light.

Back on the engine it was time to sort out the air inlet. I’ve been musing about this for some time, wondering how best to do it. In the end I’ve done something similar to that which I did on the ’07 engine. It does have to be slightly different because the ’08 airbox has a panel filter in it rather than the cylindrical ones on the older engine. It became clear that I was going to have to replace the filter entirely so the first thing was to just get some air into the airbox. This would have to be through the top so I did something similar to what I did before and bonded a lump of tubing into a specially cut hole in the top of the airbox cover, as in the photo.

The tubing is actually 100mm PVC soil pipe. I only had to buy 3 metres of this so I’ve got about 2.8 metres left. Since I did this I’ve been wondering if I could get the whole pipe hot enough to just bend it around to face the breeze. Before I thought of that, though, I did what I did before and used some 100mm flexible ducting that I had (in that case because I had to buy 4 metres of it!) and made a mount for a spun aluminium inlet duct.

Obviously, I’d need an air filter. A while ago I’d bought some proper filter foam and I cut some of that to the size of the airbox cover and I’ve held it in place with some large size mesh, as in the photo. The curious colouration in the photo is the filter oil which I’ve since spread out properly in the foam; at this point it was sitting in some pools…

The end result of all this can be seen in the next photo, along with a cover that I fabricated over the secondary fuel rail and injectors so as to stop the odd scrute having a heart attack. I’ve also trimmed the rear bodywork to fit around the new airbox which is, of course, a slightly different shape from the old one.

Along the way about this, I’ve been wondering about how well the airbox actually works. So, as a start to looking at this I’ve wired the output of the MAP sensor into the data logger. I started the engine again to check what this did and it said that when I turned on the ignition the pressure in the inlet ducts was just under 1 bar (no surprise there, it was raining cats and dogs at the time). Once the engine was started the pressure dropped to about 0.75 bar. Again, as the throttles were closed that’s probably reasonable. What will be interesting is to see what the pressure is at WOT (wide open throttle) in race situations, especially at speed with the air inlet pointing into 100mph breeze. If it works well I might try putting another MAP sensor actually inside the airbox, and upstream of the throttles.

With all that done there’s just a couple of things to do (apart from the usual, of course). These are the exhaust, and I’m taking the car up to Andy’s tomorrow to see about sorting that, and the clutch. The clutch release on this engine is cable, unlike the hydraulic actuation on the old engine. I spent a while deciding whether to use a cable or modify the engine so as to fit a slave cylinder. Eventually I decided to do it as Mr Honda intended so I’m getting a decent clutch cable of the right length. Hopefully this won’t be too difficult to fit. I did try making a cable using some cable components (inner, outer, etc) that I had around, but it was horrible, with just too much internal friction. Hopefully the proper cable won’t suffer from that. I’m going to have to modify the clutch pedal to link the cable to it, but that shouldn’t be too difficult. It’d better work because I’ve removed most of the hydraulic stuff…

With those two details done the car will be ready for the next race at Snetterton, apart from mapping, alignment, testing, etc., etc…

Apart from starting to make a big list of things to buy, do and design, I started out with clearing out the garage. I’m going to have to try and build the car with the Fury tucked in the corner of the garage, unless I can find some other convenient way of storing the Fury. In the meantime, I know this will work as I originally built the Fury while the Dax was still in the garage, and I think that was wider than the Fury is, even though it was a se7en-like car.

So, I had a huge tidy-up in the garage, chucked loads of stuff away, put loads of stuff in the shed and moved some of the shelving units out of the garage and into the shed.

And then I re-painted the floor! I’ve been threatening to do this for a couple of years but I’ve finally got around to it. The problem is, the only real way to do it is to shift all the stuff into one half of the garage and paint the other half. When that’s done you shift everything back over and paint the other bit. The photo above is half way through the process…

With that done I could do a few things. As part of the Spectre build I keep thinking about things I’d like to do differently this time. One of these is about anti-roll bars. regular readers will know that I made front and rear bars for the Fury. However, I’ve discovered that the ARBs that are made for the Caterham are actually pretty well made and probably useable on other chassis. In fact, Josh Smith’s Phoenix had a Caterham ARB added to it which seems to be evidence that it will work.

So, I bought a bar from the Caterham parts website, as in the photo here. This is a ½” bar, and they do a slightly thicker one as well.

When I get the chassis, which Jeremy reckons will be shortly after the next race meeting at Mallory Park, I can see if there’s any way to sensibly use this bar, at both the front and rear of the car. Jeremy is a bit askance at me wanting to fit bars, but experience has shown that, if nothing else, they’re incredibly useful for setting the car up. Of course, it rather depends on where the car’s roll axis is. When I get the chassis I shall measure everything as accurately as I can in order to put all the dimensions into SusProg3D so that I can plot the suspension’s movement properly.

Just about the only scrappie part I’ll have on the new car, I hope, is the rear hubs. Essentially, there’s no reason to buy new ones. Here’s the complete front uprights from a 1998 Ford Fiesta that I bought from a breaker. Rusty, as you can see…

The older version of Jeremy’s Spectre design uses this complete upright, only positioned upside-down. The version I’m getting uses custom uprights that Jeremy has designed, as shown here.

This upright uses just the hub from the Fiesta upright (or “hub carrier” as Ford call it) so I needed to get the hubs out of the breaker’s uprights.

That’s easier said than done, it turns out. The hubs are essentially pressed into the bearings in the standard uprights. As such, the manual says that ideally they should be pressed out. So, I did so.

I supported the upright using a couple of lengths of M10 studding and by resting the steering arm on my bench vice, as shown in the photo here.

I then pressed out the hub using my preferred press tool, otherwise known as my favourite big hammer. Yes folks, I really do have a favourite hammer! What’s more, it’s a proper engineering ball pein hammer and not the workworking abortions that several friends insist on using.

When treated to a few serious whacks, the hubs come out quite easily. I must admit that I’m not totally happy about this, as it means that if I need to take the hubs off to change the wheel studs, for example, then I’ll have to take the suspension apart to the point that I can get the upright on a bench so that I’m able to use a press tool on it. If nothing else, that means I’ll have to be very careful about making sure that the studs in the hubs are definitely the length that I want before putting the uprights together.

Jeremy tells me that the new uprights will come with bearings, and I guess they’ll be the Fiesta bearings. One thing I don’t quite know how to do is how to separate the bearing completely from the hub. A bit of the bearing, as it promises in the manual, remains on the hub as can be seen in this photo. The manual just says to remove this using a puller. Of course, the puller you’d need would have to fit into a gap that must be at least 1mm wide. I may have to use a couple of screwdrivers… Doubtless reassembly is the reverse of disassembly…

At least I’m doing something. As well as these uprights I also bought the driveshafts from the poor unfortunate Fiesta that donated the uprights. I wanted to see what the joints were like, and to see what the shafts themselves were like. I did wonder if I could reuse the CV joints but they don’t look entirely perfect. Consequently, what I’ll probably do is buy a couple of new driveshafts and use the breaker ones as exchange parts. That’ll get me the joints and I can then get driveshafts of the length I need from the chap that supplied the ones I use on the Fury. Interestingly, the inner joints on the Fiesta driveshafts are the tripode variety, with a Lobro joint used for the outer one; presumably because the outer joint has to articulate more on the (steering) front wheels of the Fiesta.