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.
And so, after a season of frenetic car building, engine swaps and sundry other excitements the RGB year ground to a halt at Cadwell at the weekend. It was, yet again, a wet weekend although a very enjoyable one. That the club managed to get 26 races on track over the 2 days, along with all the qualifying sessions, is a testament to how well organised it is. For something that only has two paid staff (and lots and lots of volunteers) this is pretty miraculous.
So, it was time for another race. I decided that I could take the weekend off finishing my thesis (which I have since finished, yay!) and make the loooong drive to Pembrey for two RGB races. Problem with Pembrey is that it’s a long way and it has a bad habit of raining. Rain as in absolutely pouring down, not that sort of pathetic English rain but the full-on Welsh variety.
It’s getting back to normal service here. especially as I’ve just finished the first final draft (yes, I know that doesn’t make sense) of my thesis. So,I thought to myself, “I’ll update the blog before I go to bed”. See? I really care.
After all the stuff I’ve done recently, a sensible person would get the car to a dyno to set it up properly. However, I just won’t have time for that so I decided to fit the wideband lambda sensor on the car. When I designed the wiring loom I included wiring for this sensor, which I had installed on the Fury, but I never got around to installing the sensor. As I’d put the boss into the exhaust it seemed that now was a decent time to install it.
I’m still in a bit of a quandary about what happened to the chain and sprockets. I spent a while measuring it as accurately as I could tell and I think the driven sprocket was translated about 0.9mm to the right of where it should be and was at an angle of 0.3° to the drive sprocket. I’m not an expert at chains but that doesn’t sound horrendous.
