We set off at 1830 on Thursday evening and got to the circuit at about 0015. Friday was a test day and we were expecting to find a mostly empty paddock. As it was, just about the entire 750 club had clearly decided that some testing was in order and the paddock was already absolutely packed.

Still, we found a space, with Colin and Adrian who arrived at about the same time, although nowhere near the RGB bit (which was about as big as would be needed for 10 cars). On the bright side, we were in reach of the power sockets.

The big thing at Anglesey is the weather, and the forecast was none too encouraging. Friday morning, though, looked fine. We signed on and were rather dismayed that, I guess as a consequence of the popularity, we only had four 25 min sessions in the day. What’s more, in the morning we were in a session with the 750 Formula chaps, making a total of 17 cars on track. That was OK but in the afternoon we were on track with the Locosts, with a total of 37 cars on the track. Gulp. What’s more, the locosts are a lot slower than us which was going to be hard on both them and us.

Still, it was out for the first session at the start of the day. The car immediately made a funning ticking noise. It sounded like something was being fouled by something rotating. My first thought was a stone stuck in a wheel/caliper/disc. However, the frequency was too high for that. I came along the pit lane and listened and it seemed to be slightly better so I had another go.

Nope, it was horrid. So, I came back to the paddock. I’d been thinking that it might be the prop and I’m a bit sensitive about propshafts for some reason…

Back in the paddock I started looking at the wheels and driveshafts and then remembered that I’d adjusted the reverser which hadn’t been working properly at Spa. I bet that was it. So, I just backed it off a mile so that nothing would foul and went back out, just in time to see the chequered flag deployed. Rats!

That was 50% of the best testing time used up and I’d done two out laps.

Back on track in the later session and at least the car wasn’t making a horrible noise. I set about learning how to drive the circuit with the CBR1000. My FL before this day was 1:16.44, surely i could go faster? However, as usual, it took me ages to get up to speed. (I have to work out how to do this better…) By the end of this session I’d managed a 1:16.1.

Problem is, I’d forgotten that Anglesey is another vomit-tastic circuit and I’d forgotten to take the sea-sickness pills. Consequently, I felt really grim when I came in. Luckily, I could sit and take stock. That is, I sat in the car until I was sure I could get out without throwing up.

After lunch, I was feeling a bit better and set off again. This time I started getting the hang of it, and the Locost boys and girls were very good about not holding us up too much. I did worry that we were rather mugging them all the time.

By the end of the day I’d not done too much fiddling with the setup, as I just wasn’t on top of the circuit. However, I was now down to 1:15.31 which at least on track for a decent time.

However, there was a small problem in that the car was running hotter than it usually does. Normally, it sits at around 80° for the water temperature. This time it was more like 92° 0r 93°. I suspect that this is because of the splitter changing the airflow into the radiator. In fact, one of the things I still want to do is to change the way the air is ducted into the radiator. According to the estimable Mr Smith the size of the hole in the front of my car is way too big and causes much more drag than is necessary. (I know I bang on about Carroll Smith a lot, but his books are very, very, highly recommended.)

In fact, this all came to a head after the last test session, when I’d gone fastest. When I stopped in the paddock the temperature was pretty high, as it always is when the car stops as the airflow has been dramatically reduced. (Hmm, perhaps I should buy a bigger fan?) I assumed that it’d be OK (it always had been) but when I got back later there was a lot of coolant all over the floor.

On investigation later the coolant temperature has shot up rather more than usual, as you can see by the far right hand of the temperature log here. What’s more, there was a leak from the water line that goes into the oil/water intercooler which clearly wasn’t helping. So, I sorted the leak by replacing the hoseclip and all seemed OK again.

One thing that I might try before the next race is to add some ducting. A tweak that Duncan is using is to duct some air from the front of the car directly onto the oil/water intercooler. Apparently he reckons it drops the oil temperature by about 10°, and that’s bound to have a consequential effect on the water temperature. What’s more, it sounds rather simple to do! I even already have some suitable ducting.

So, race day 1 dawned. Well, it didn’t really because it rained all night. Well, “rained” isn’t really the right word. It teemed down. It absolutely threw  it down. There was a chap up on the hill building a big wooden boat and trying to keep his cargo from eating each other.

Now, I actually quite like driving in the wet. But, I don’t like getting wet… Still, I put the wets on, disconnected the rear ARB, softened the front one dramatically and softened the dampers. That is, I forgot about yesterday’s results and set off to see what it was like in the wet.

Not surprisingly, it was wet, and slippery, and wet. What’s more, I had another problem in that my throttle pedal foot was sticking on the throttle pedal. I’ve had this before and it causes a problem in that it’s hard to control the throttle at low openings. Of course, this is disastrous in the wet. Practically every lap I was sideways at Rocket Out, there’s an example in the video just below, because when I tried to open the throttle slightly it jumped to 50% open and I spun up the rear wheels. The marshalls must have wondered what I was playing at.

As a consequence, I qualified a lowly 15th and 13th for the two races, although they were both 3rd in class. There was never going to be a chance to get past everyone and up to where I ought to have been. By the time the race came around it was still raining prodigiously. They took pity on us and gave us a green flag lap. I got a not too awful start, probably because it was wet and set off.

To cut a long story short, starting from 15th I made my way up to 7th by the end of the race passing loads of people on the way. (Miraculously, there was only one DNF and nobody broke anything serious.) The circuit was in surprisingly good condition. It was very, very wet but there was a surprising amount of grip in some places, in particular up the hill to Rocket In which is one of the main overtaking spots. Mind you, I was looking at the video and driving a light car at 110mph in the soaking wet just millimetres from the white lines and (shock) grass is really  bonkers. Fun though.

Here’s an edited version of the video:

The next day dawned overcast but it wasn’t actually raining. Colin and I went for an early morning bike ride round the circuit and it was clearly going to dry quite quickly as it was mega-windy. Assuming, of course, that it didn’t rain again. We managed to get a forecast from RAF Valley which is just up the road and that said it wasn’t going to actually rain so we set about putting the settings back to where they had been.

Out on the circuit I got my traditional absolutely awful start. I have to figure out a way of getting the CBR1000 off the line, I’m clearly doing something wrong at the moment. As a consequence, half the field passed me. However, it was immaterial as two laps into the race there was a major coming together on the back straight. Apparently Duncan had got off the circuit onto the grass (very easy because you’re trying to take as wide a line as possible at that point) and spun back onto the circuit where he’d collected Tim Gray. Also, Rob Grant had had to take avoiding action and piled into a tyre wall as a consequence. Afterwards he was speaking very approvingly about his HANS device. I do keep wondering about getting one.

So, they re-gridded us and away we went again. Yet again an awful start and half the field passed me. Also, yet again, I got stuck behind a slower, but faster in a straight line, class A car in the shape of David’s BDN. Try as I might I couldn’t get past and I essentially spent the entire race trying various lines to get around him. We were going reasonably quickly though in that I finished with an FL of 1:14.84, although this time I’d only made it up to 9th place. Of course, after the race, I figured out what I should have done to have got past David. I seem to be awfully clever after the event these days.

Again, here’s an edited video of the race:

So, at least the car’s not bent and in goodish order. The only problem is that a bit of the undertray came loose duing the second race, perhaps as a result of kerb damage. It folded under the car and was scraping alarmingly as I got back into the paddock. Of course, that could have slowed me down, or even speeded me up as a consequence of blocking some of the underbody airflow… I’ll need to sort that, and a few minor things, before going to Brands Hatch next…

We’re working up now to the next race at Anglesey. As I write it’s warm and sunny outside; doubtless this presages a race weekend at Anglesey with horizontal rain. Having suffered hugely at Anglesey in the past I’m very wary about the weather there.

The big change to the car over the last couple of weeks is the appearance of various aerodynamic addons. I realised a while ago (clever, me) that with the move to class B I’m not limited to “standard” bodywork anymore. Consequently, I could experiment with additional aero devices. The RGB regs don’t allow anything having an airfoil cross-section, so means wings are out. However, there’s a large collection of other aero devices commonly used on race cars that are allowed. I’ve done a bit of reading about it, and also been talking to Tom about it. As he’s got an aerodynamics degree it’s about time he paid for his education…

So, the first thing was I made a splitter. This is a mostly horizontal ledge at the lower front of the car. The idea is that there’s a stagnation point in the airflow just above the splitter (like the streamline that stops right at the front of the airfoil above). At the stagnation point the velocity of the air is zero and hence, according to that nice Mr Bernoulli, the pressure’s highest. This pressure acts on the splitter and pushes the front of the car down. Of course, with something like the Fury the best I can hope to achieve will be to reduce the lift.

Of course, a splitter will likely also increase the drag; the aerodynamic texts, such as Katz, all talk about lift/drag ratios.

So, I made something. Tradition is that splitters are made of plywood. I mounted a small lump of this under the front of the Fury’s bonnet. It’s attached to the bonnet with various small pillars which I tried to attach to the bonnet in a manner that would mean that the splitter wouldn’t tear off as soon as the car went above 60 MPH.

Of course, if it were just as in the photo here it wouldn’t do anything as there isn’t any reason for the airflow to stagnate. Hence, I blocked up the rear of the splitter with some aluminium. Essentially making a wall up against the support pillars. I then used some red tape to cover up the ply so it didn’t look quite so naff. (Although, as you can see in the photo above, the bodywork is really starting to look rather tired. Whatever else happens to this car I’m going to have to respray it one day.)

As you can see in the photo on the right. The splitter is not actually attached to the car. That’s an odd thing to do, as you wouldn’t think it would work there. Ah well, I’ve got a cunning plan, you see…

In an ideal world the effect of the splitter would be to increase how well the front of the car worked which should tend to make the car oversteer, although along the way it might well go quicker anyway. If the car did oversteer then I’d really need something to make the rear of the car work better. As the RGB regs don’t permit a wing I’m going to have to make do with a small spoiler. So, I fabricated the aluminium beast that you see here.

This is quite a modest size, but some simple calculations say that it should have some effect. In an ideal world this will create some rear downforce (or reduce the lift) so as to counteract the oversteer induced by the splitter. Eagle-eyed readers will note that the spoiler is attached by Clekos in this photo. That’s because I wanted to take this off too, as part of the cunning plan.

So, what was the cunning plan then? Well, we were making one of our occasional forays to Spa for a trackday or two. My plan was to drive the car as it used to be and then attach the splitter. With luck I’d get barrow loads of oversteer which would go away when the spoiler was installed.

To cut a long story short, that did seem to be the case. The other obvious effect was that running the splitter seemed to decrease braking distances dramatically. My original intention had been to then take the devices off again and see if things got worse again, as it was hardly a double blind test; not even single blind come to that. However, the second of the two Spa days was wet, really wet, and the general low-quality of the organisation of the trackday (not an organiser I shall be using again) meant that I got next to no useful track time. As I’ve seen before, the circuit was filled with really expensive cars which were incredibly incompetently driven.

So, with all that done it seems worth persevering. So, I shall leave the bits and pieces on for the next race meeting which is at Anglesey. In fact, I’ve spent a while this week checking over the car in readiness for this meeting. I just hope the weather here works out well.

The only problem with all this is that the bodywork mods seem to have created a vibration. I don’t think that it’s a fundamental problem, but I do worry about things like the propshaft after the fire of a couple of years ago. I shall have to be careful at Anglesey…

On the grid I was right behind Colin who was behind the Mondeo. Unfortunately, Chris Allanson pulled off on the green flag lap. There was clearly something wrong with his car but I didn’t manage to catch up with him to find out what it was.

I got a decent start and was right up behind Colin. There were then a few laps when I was right with him but couldn’t manage to put any sort of run together. After that I just sort of dropped back slowly. As usual, my FL was on an earlier lap, lap 2 in this case. However, it was faster than I’d ever been before at 1:16.4. The problem is, Colin was just a tenth or two faster and he just pulled away slowly from me.

I keep wondering what’s going on here. The most obvious explanation is that I’m just too heavy, that car’s about 35kg over the weight limit and I think Colin’s is about 10kg over. That 25kg just seems to have a continuous and small effect. If I could just manage to lose some weight (and the driver is the obvious place to lose it) then I’m sure it’d make a decent difference over time. It’s very hard though.

So, I finished in 5th place which was pretty good really. And so to bed…

The next day, Sunday, was interesting because we were racing on the International circuit. This picture here is the data logger’s diagram of the circuit. As oyu can see it’s like the Coastal circuit, albeit with an extra bit tacked on consisting of two straights and a hairpin. From walking the circuit, and watching the Graduates qualify, it looked pretty good. The two corners into and out of the new section looked pretty difficult and the hairpin seemed quite good too.

So, Colin and I again got ourselves at the front of the queue and we charged off. Of course, with this layout being rather longer we got fewer laps for qualifying which made life difficult as we were learning the new corners with only a few attempts. However, I was quite pleased with the 1:39.76 that I scored; mainly because it was quicker than Colin’s time. At the time I thought I’d been held up on that particular lap on the straight away from the hairpin. However, as that particular sector was the fastest I managed all weekend in that sector I wonder if that small hold up actually gave me a bit of a tow. I certainly didn’t get within 2 tenths of the sector time in the rest of the day. However, the data logs don’t really bear that out as wasn’t quicker down the straight bit at all.

Come the race start and we had a new chap in front of us in a Ginetta G50, the Mondeo having suffered a battering in the second race on Saturday and gone home. There was a rumour that the G50 driver had never done a standing start before which was slightly worrying. However, when the lights went out he got away not too badly and I was just behind him as we left the banking. He pulled away, not surprisingly, but things seemed to be going OK.

However, it wasn’t to last. The first time through the entry to the circuit extension I missed a gear and Colin managed to outbrake me into the hairpin. However, he then ran wide and I got straight past him. The problem was that on the next lap I had a large oversteery moment at Rocket and ran wide onto the grass. Colin got past and that was essentially the end of the race. I ran with Colin OK but couldn’t get close enough to attempt any sort of move. If he’d messed anything up, which I surely would have done, then I’d have got past easily but it wasn’t to be. I did get quite close to him towards the end of the race but a lapped backmarker obviously didn’t see me and was all set to drive into me at Church so I had to back out. After that I was just too far away.

Oh well. Still, it was a nice weekend and I’m set for the next weekend at Silverstone now. I’ve booked some testing to try and get my head around it all again. Hopefully, it’ll be fun.

The photo here, by the way, I’ve nicked from the WRDA site. I hope they don’t mind… This is just after thestart of the first race on Saturday and I’m in 7th place having had to take avoiding action from that Mondeo in front of me which made an attempt at knocking me off the track. He later on made another attempt on Colin (who’s actually in the lead here) which battered Colin’s already considerably battered car rather seriously.

I booked myself in for half a day’s testing on the Friday before the meeting. After the rubbish season that I’ve been having I was giving myself a talking to about not overdriving the thing but I don’t know that it was really doing much good. Mind you, I might not as well have bothered with the testing as the weather was appalling. Not only was it chucking it down with rain, but the wind was astonishing. There’s a little wind turbine in the paddock, reputed to supply enough power for the power takeoffs in the paddock, and it looked as though it was about to take off all day.

When we’d been here earlier in the season, my FL was 1:17.26, although other class C people were doing in the region of a second quicker than that. (Apart from the bonkerd people like Tim Gray who was another half second quicker again.) In the first test session I did a whole 1:33.34 which give you an idea what the weather was like. The second session was down to 1:26.23 as the rain had stopped by then and the circuit was starting to dry. It was still very slippy though as you can tell from the times.

The Saturday race day dawned surprisingly nice. I’d been assuming that we were in for doom and pestilence the whole weekend but apparently not. We were racing on the Coastal circuit this day, as shown in the diagram here. This is the circuit that we used for the 750 meeting a while ago. The race on Sunday, though, was on the international circuit which includes a couple of different corners and some additional straights.

The WRDA races include all sorts of different classes meaning that just about anything can race. As such there were a couple of very quick ex-BTCC cars there and a real collection of other odds and sods including Colin and me. It was clear that many people had entered this race so as to get some more track time in additional to the race that they were “really” supposed to be in. In qualifying it was interesting to see that Colin and I used normal RGB tactics and got right near the front of the queue. The similarity of performance in RGB means that there’s a premium for getting on track early and having a couple of clearish laps. However, once qualifying started we did the first lap moderately slowly, so as to allow all the grid out of the assembly area before we got back to the start. Some dumbo in a Cateringvan charged past us on the first lap which meant we had to barge past him a bit later in qualifying. He’d almost certainly have been better sitting behind us and trying to get a tow.

As it was, I ended up with a 1:16.98 which was a bit quicker than before which was nice. I was 6th on the grid, behind Colin though who’d managed a 16.2. No idea how as I was just behind him all the time. My fastest lap was actually on the very last lap which was odd, normally I’ve gone off the boil by then.

We were doing two races on the Saturday, first and last on the programme, with the starting order for the second being determined by the finishing order in the first race. So, we lined up rather early and after a rather luxiourious green flag lap, we gridded up. I was just behind Colin who was behind the Seat. Before the race the chap who drives the Mondeo had tried to make out, rather unsportingly, in my opnion, that the race would be a rolling start. As he was already waaay quicker than everyone else on a 1:12.3 that seemed rather odd.

As it turned out the front wheel drive cars were very slow off the line, which probably explains the rolling start issue. When the lights went out Colin got past the Seat which baulked me as I tried to go round the outside. Then the pole-sitting Mondeo, which several of us including me and Colin had passed at the start, swiped across in the front of me and I had to get out of the throttle; it seemed to me as though he wasn’t looking too hard at what was going on about him. Most amazing of all, Chris Allanson (of whose company, Z-Cars, I’ve read a lot) shot past us to end up some way in front of me. He’d started two rows behind me so was obviously going well. His car was a “Mini” which had a Hayabusa engine and which seemed to be quicker in a straight line than me but slower in the corners.

Up at the front Mondeo man barged past Colin on the back straight on the second lap, knocking Colin’s bodywork about considerably in the process. Chris had a grandstand view and he was pretty forthright about it afterwards. Then the couple of highly powered (think 300bhp) Caterfields in front of me got past Chris and I ended up just behind him. We had a great time, to be honest although I noticed that Chris was taking the Corkscrew very wide which I’d learnt was the wrong thing to do when were here before. On the next lap he did the same again, after having missed the apex at Peel by some distance and I stuck the Fury (or a “Fun”, as the programme had it) up the inside and I was past. The problem is, I wasn’t really quicker and I then spent the next few laps driving the widest car on the track.

Then Chris managed to get a much better run through Church than he had done and he just blasted past on the way up to Rocket. I could have made an issue about it, but that didn’t seem very sporting. Then it was back to me crawling all over Chris again but on the last lap we caught up a few backmarkers and there wasn’t time to make anything stick.

So, I finished in 6th place and would start the next race from that position, just alongside Chris. My fastest lap was 1:16.76 but that was before I got past Chris after which we’d clearly both affected each others’ lap times. Mind you, Chris’s fastest lap was 1:17.13 so I should have been able to drive away from him. Needless to say, I didn’t. I went to search him out in the paddock afterwards to check that he was OK about the width of my car. I needn’t have worried as he was a most gracious competitor. In fact, he had clearly had an absolute whale of a time. I was really looking forward to starting the next race alongside him, although which his starting ability (which he attributed to grass tracking experience) I suspected he’d be in the lead by the time I got going.

I’ll put the rest in the next post, as this one’s already a bit long.