Life’s been busy mostly with work but also a weekend away for the 750 Motor Club annual awards and dinner dance. As I did last year I went up on the Friday evening as I was doing race licence medicals all day on the Saturday. I did manage to get the engine dropped into the chassis and bolted in before heading up to Stratford though.

Next on the to do list was making up some new oil hoses. I decided to make entirely new hoses as the old ones were looking a bit tatty in places. This was all pretty straightforward and I got it done in an afternoon.

The new remote oil filter is bolted onto the tank cover and sits in the way of the fuel pressure regulator so I had to relocate that which then meant redoing the fuel hoses. These are again braided hose with the anodised aerospace fittings and redoing these on the -6 hose was actually quite a lot trickier than the -10 oil hoses as the fittings aren’t quite so user friendly.

I eventually got the fuel lines finished but then it was ages before I got back to the car with a busy work schedule that included weekends getting in the way along with a trip to Wembley to watch the Swans lift the Capital One Cup. With only three weeks to go to the first race meeting I was determined to make the most of my day off on Friday 1st March. I decided the next job was to get the engine loom fitted to see where things can sit, I need to have the ECU somewhere visible and try to get the Power Commander and voltage regulator somewhere with some air flow around them. The first minor glitch was when I couldn’t find the starter solenoid which was puzzling as I’d removed it when I did the loom. After a brief search I gave up and decided to use the old one. But by late morning I realised the solenoid was probably sitting with the ECU which I also couldn’t find. It’s a while since I did the loom so I decided I must have put it ‘somewhere safe’ and set about searching. The garage is a bit of a tip with dismantled engines and car parts everywhere so it took a while going through everything. I then tried the utility room in the house, the study, but to no avail. I started searching for it at about 11:30 and by 4:45 it still hadn’t turned up and to say I was in a bit of a mood after wasting over half a day would have been putting it very politely. Of course it’s different to the old one and is even matched to the ignition key so getting a replacement was likely to be expensive.

Shortly after stomping into the house and getting changed David decided to have a look in the cubby hole under the stairs where the vacuum cleaner and his golf clubs live. And there it was. One ZX10R ECU sitting next to a starter solenoid. Obviously I hadn’t put it there, I think Jen or her Mum must have come across it and tucked it in there not realising what it was.

Saturday morning was spent getting the motorhome down for an MOT followed by our trip to the Liberty Stadium, Sunday was an 8am to 2pm work shift followed by a couple of jobs in the house so nothing else got done over the weekend

19 days to Donington …

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OK, nothing automotive or motorsport related in this post I’m afraid. A simple plug. Most readers will already have been nagged but I’m not going to apologise

I don’t think I’ve ever done anything for charity before but when my friend’s daughter died last year and he said he was going to do a charity bike ride to raise funds for the local cancer care centre I said I’d join him.

Jenny was 23 when she died, we’d known her since she was small, she’d been in school with our kids. She lived for 12 months after her cancer was diagnosed and I know the last few weeks were particularly harrowing for Rob and Kez, her parents.

So next Wednesday I’m flying out to Paris with Rob, Jenny’s brother Sam and a bunch of others who knew Jenny to cycle back from Paris to Swansea. Thursday we ride from the Champs-Élysées to Val de Reuil then on to Caen. We get the ferry overnight then ride from Portsmouth to Bristol on Saturday, heading back to Swansea on Sunday. It’s about 85 miles a day which isn’t the furthest I’ve ridden in a day by a long chalk but doing it 4 days consecutively will be fairly hard work. There are only a couple of us in the team who have doing any ‘proper’ cycling before, most of the guys have bought their bikes specifically for the ride. They’ve done variable amounts of training it has to be said, some are now pretty fit while I suspect others will struggle!

I’ve personally contributed the cost of the trip so any donations will be going straight to the charity, Maggie’s Cancer Caring Centre who gave great support to Jenny and her family. We’re a team of 17 doing the ride and we’ve managed to reach our target of £24,000 but every additional donation will help. We’re using the BT MyDonate website as they don’t take any commission from donations, just the charges made by the credit card. So if you feel inclined to contribute please visit our BT MyDonate page, even if it’s only a small contribution.

No-one seems to have been hospitalised following the RGB BBQ last night so here’s the recipe for the spicy pulled pork.

Ingredients

• Pork Shoulder
• BBQ sauce (couple of bottles)
• Paprika
• Chili powder + flakes
• Onions
• Brown Sugar
• Cayenne Pepper
• Garlic powder
• Gherkins
• Rolls

Mix together the spices and the sugar, trim any fat/rind off the pork joint then rub the spices into the pork, wrap in cling film and leave in the fridge overnight. No quantities are given for the spices, use your imagination! I use a fairly hot cajun BBQ sauce but you can use a milder one.

Next morning chop the onions and add to the slow cooker with the BBQ sauce and cook slowly for 8-12 hours.

Once it’s done remove the sauce with a ladle and transfer to a pan, heat and reduce till it’s fairly thick. Shred the pork using a pair of forks (that’s the pulling bit!) then stir in the sauce. Serve with bread rolls and some sliced gherkins. And beer

After a busy week mostly spent in Croydon it was good to get back to the car on Friday. The rad ducts on the BDN are beautifully made and very light GRP mouldings that duct the air from the ‘nostrils’ in the bonnet through the radiators in each sidepod and then exhaust the hot air into the channel between the rear wheel arch and the engine cover. They’re sealed around the rad ensuring extremely good flow of air through the rads, hence needing to actually tape up one rad when I went to the rolling road last year. However when I fitted the new nearside duct after the Snetterton crash I didn’t trim quite enough off the rear edge of the duct meaning that it projected a bit too far forward. Apart from looking a bit unsightly it meant the edges of the duct were visible and contactable by the VOSA man’s sphere of doom. So my first job on Friday morning was to remove said duct, remove the retaining brackets and trim a centimetre or so off the rear edge. I then refitted it and rebonded the brackets onto it with PU sealant.

The sealant of course took ages to go off in the near freezing temperatures. I then removed the offside sidepod to make a start on fitting the side impact protection bars. After my crash at Snetterton it was clear that I’d been quite lucky not to have a broken leg and Ian immediately started thinking about how the footwell could be reinforced. It’s a weak area on any car due to the lack of clearance between the front wheel and the chassis. I think Ian considered a few options, including a composite aluminium honeycomb but decided in the end on a length of aluminium square box section. Very simple but a surprisingly easy bolt-on fixing via one of the 10mm bulkhead bolts at the front (as shown in the pic to the right) and an 8mm bolt at the rear that required a rivnut in the chassis tube. My rivnut gun won’t do 8mm nuts so I used a bit of steel bar and an 8mm bolt and nut as described here.

The box section sits immediately below the front rad duct and is barely visible even without the sidepod on. Here’s a pic of the rear end of it bolted onto the chassis rail. On Saturday I set about trimming the sidepods to fit around the new additions – this took a bit more time than I’d anticipated as the aluminium box section in places runs along the line of the lower curve of the sidepod and needed quite a few trial fittings before I was happy. As a consequence I only got the offside one done.

The nearside one of course didn’t take quite so long and once I was happy with it I refitted both sidepods. I hadn’t been completely happy with the new mirror and decided it could do to be a bit higher so I turned an aluminium mount to raise it by an inch or so. And that was that for another weekend.

I rang to rearrange the test and the first date I could fit it in with the inspector was the afternoon on Friday 2nd March. The weekend before this I set up the front wheel alignment using my trusty aluminium angles and string box. Although the general recommendation on the Locostbuilders forum was for some toe out to achieve some self-centring Ian advised that because of the geometry and kingpin angle on my car a bit of toe in would be better. Along with the reversed steering arms to reduce the Ackerman angle and the new wishbones I’m hoping to have solved that little problem but haven’t really got room to test it out.

The trusty motorhome is three years old in the first week of March so it needed its first MOT. I booked it into the local Halfords as my local garage couldn’t get it into their bay. After waiting for a while I was informed that it had failed with a loose CV joint boot and a brake light bulb not working. The guy was writing out the paperwork when the manager came along and said he’d get their guy to stick a new clip on the CV boot and slap a new bulb in and pass it. Well chuffed, even more chuffed when it turned out they had a deal on MOTs at £27.50

At the IVA there had been a slight imbalance between the left and right front brakes, not enough to be an issue for the test but I wasn’t terribly happy with it. I decided the only reasons it could be were glazed pads on one side, a contaminated disk or a bit of air in one side. So I cleaned up the pads on some emery cloth, cleaned up the disks with brake cleaner and re-bled the front brakes.

With that the car’s ready bar slapping the seats back in, reprogramming the DigiDash (so the mph display is always visible) and temporarily fixing the headlight covers back on (so I can easily adjust them at the test centre). Although I’m hopeful the car will pass it’s not the end of the world if it doesn’t. The season’s getting close though so I’ll need to get the car back into race trim at the weekend anyway, you get 6 months grace after each fail to resubmit so I can retry in a longer gap in the middle of the season. I’ve got a trackday booked at Anglesey on Sunday 11th March along with a bit of instruction. Following Colin’s testing at Mallory (Tim Grey diagnosed it as having too much front downforce compared to the rear) I’ve been in discussion with Colin and both Ian and Brian Baldwin, clearly my car doesn’t seem to have as much imbalance as Colin’s (possibly due to Colin’s having a full cage) but the plan is to keep the splitter as high as possible to minimise front downforce.

Well I finally made it out to the garage again. I’ve been fairly busy but the main problem was one of inertia and ‘getting round to it’; once you’ve put things off for a while it just gets worse. I think it was also partly the length of the to do list.

After an early afternoon finish on Friday I headed out and tidied up the clutter that had accumulated in the garage over the last few weeks and scratched my head wondering where to start. In the end I decided on the wishbones or lower links as Ian and Brian refer to them. Before heading off to Australia for his son Rob’s wedding Brian made up a new pair of lower front wishbones for me and got them tigged up by Bob at Concept Racing and even got them painted and the spherical joints and bushes installed. I also collected a couple of other parts but more about those later.

So with the front of the car jacked up I got the offside wheel off and removed the lower wishbone. The new one moves the lower spherical joint about half an inch forward thus introducing a bit of castor. Ian also advised that I should swap round the steering arms which moves the attachment point for the trackrod outboard by about 10mm, thus decreasing the Ackermann angle which should induce an increase in slip angle in the tyres when steered and therefore increase the self aligning torque. I had to lengthen the trackrod to do this but there was plenty of thread. I’ll need to recheck the geometry at some stage before representing the car for IVA, although the advice from the Locostbuilders forum was to give the geometry some toe out Ian’s recommended some additional toe in. The guys on LCB are pretty reliable but given that Ian knows the specifics of the BDN geometry I’ll stick to his advice. He’s also recommended dropping the tyre pressures which should give it some pneumatic trail.

The next thing to tackle was noise. Everybody at race weekends comments on how quiet my car is and the IVA inspector also reckoned the silencer wasn’t the problem. apart from the obvious exhaust noise there are 3 other sources of noise:
1. the actual mechanical noise of the engine which of course isn’t all that far from the meter given the mid-engined layout
2. induction noise – this isn’t too bad particularly when the engine isn’t under load.
3. the noise from panel rattle, particularly the rear undertray

To tackle the panel rattle I got some foil backed self-adhesive bitumen stuff. Even with the panel thoroughly degreased it wasn’t desperately sticky but a bit of persuasion from the heat gun sorted that. And here’s a pic of the undertray with it fitted.

I then added a bit more insulation to the rear bodywork, for the bit that sits above the exhaust I used what I had left of the foil backed heat insulation mat – you can see I already had some protecting the bit over the secondaries and I added the section on the right of the pic.

Next I added some of the felt type sound insulating cloth to the offside rear cover using some spray adhesive. This took a little time due to all the compound curves. Apart from damping any vibration in the panel it will hopefully absorb some of the sound. Sadly I was unable to see what effect any of this had as the battery was flat.

I left it on charge for a few days before seeing if the insulation had made a difference. Just running it up in the garage with the engine cover up the improvement was obvious – before the rear undertray used to vibrate quite a lot with resonance at certain engine rpm. This has now gone completely which is pleasing.

I didn’t get back out there again until Saturday. I decided to look at the hazard flashers next. These run off the main flasher relay using a double pole switch which isolates left from right but my problem was that as soon as I wired a repeater LED in that flashed with whichever side it was connected to I’d hoped I might get away with that but it wasn’t to be. So after a bit of research and asking around I got a couple of these (pictured right) from Maplin a few weeks ago. A quick test confirmed that they worked exactly as advertised, with the diode in the circuit the correct way it conducted the current fine but not the other way. So all I needed to do was solder them inline into the wires from the hazard switch to the indicator switch and problem solved. I also added a warning repeater that I can stick a label one, the inspector wasn’t happy with me just having a bare LED.

I was a bit concerned about the lack of dash repeaters for indicators, main beam and rear fog. I was convinced they’d been working and was a bit worried something might have gone wrong with the dash. One minute with the DigiDash wiring diagram and it was easy enough to confirm that I’d been deluding myself and the main reason the repeaters weren’t working was because I’d never wired them in! Less than an hour with some spare wire, terminals and the soldering iron and all was soon well on that front too

On Sunday I got a side light repeater wired in then fitted another mirror. Because the airbox sticks up in the middle of the car I’d hoped to get away without a centre/’interior’ mirror – I had with the Ultima as there was absolutely no rear view in that. With the BDN although the inspector was sympathetic he said because there was a rear view in the middle, albeit limited, he did need me to fit a mirror. So I fitted one of the Racetech ones that had originally been fitted to the front cover. In fairness I think this will actually be quite useful when racing anyway.

So, quite a lot of progress made and the to do list is shrinking. The main thing to sort now is the handbrake – I plan to fit a multiplying lever to tackle this and don’t think it should be too difficult. I also need to remove the nearside sidepod as I fitted the rad ducting a bit too far forward – Brian had already commented on this and the IVA inspector had spotted that the edges of the front end of the duct were contactable with his sphere. I also need to sort the headlight alignment, trim a couple of edges at the rear and turn the rear light units around.

The chassis went back up to Hereford on Monday evening. I hadn’t seen the chassis jig before but in true Baldwin style it’s very impressive! It’s made of 4″ x 2″ steel box section and like all things BDN was designed by Ian and fabricated by Brian. It’s on big castors but once in position the threaded feet were lowered and adjusted to make sure it was square. It has lots of machined pads on it with lugs to locate the chassis tubes, these were removed as the chassis still has the undertray on it. It has a separate structure at each end with a machined aluminium plate to match the bulkheads to which the water jet cut end plates are bolted prior to fabrication of the chassis.

We got the chassis up on the jig and that was that really. Brian will bolt it all up to make sure it’s straight then will cut out the damaged tubes and replace them. He’s also going to check over the rear subframe and the engine mounts. The plating on my subframes and wishbones was a bit of a disappointment – I think it deteriorated when I took the car for its exhaust in Cardiff when there was salt on the road. Brian and Ian have a new approach, initially stimulated by the requirements for Ian’s brother Rob’s car which he’ll be racing in Australia where race car suspension parts aren’t allowed to be plated. So they’ve found a self-phosphating paint for all these parts and are using it to dip the bolts etc. as well. So once it’s back together my car really should look better than before.

I ordered replacement brake disk, cunifer brake pipe and a couple of other bits and bobs from Rally Design. I also made a trip to our local paint emporium for a load of stuff – more etch primer, high build primer, satin black as well as both white and green two pack.

My gearing’s been all to pot, always over-geared. My original calculations were based on a slightly wrong wheel circumference that I’d got from somewhere and even at Snetterton I wasn’t needing to use 6th gear at all. One thought was simply that I just wasn’t going fast enough but watching everyone else’s videos my maximum speed of 126mph was within a couple of mph of Austen and Tim so I actually wasn’t doing too bad there. I then recalculated my gearing based on my logs, i.e. I looked at the relationship between rpm and speed in 5th gear to calculate back. This turned out to be interesting as I ended up with inconsistent numbers! I guess this is due to the tyre circumference actually changing slightly at speed and possibly very minor degrees of clutch slip. I’m currently running a 50 tooth rear sprocket and decided to go for a 51, 52 and a 53 so I got those ordered from Talon Engineering, I still opted for their optional lightening holes but didn’t bother to pay to have them split this time as they’d clearly done nothing cleverer with the previous ones than cutting them in half with a hacksaw and I can do that. I also ordered a new chain from my friend Richard at M&P.

Another thing I did was bite the bullet and shell out for some video overlay software. Tim Hoverd uses Trackvision to good effect but when I’d had a go I couldn’t persuade it to import the data from my DigiDash. I’d also had a play with some software called TSX Overdrive with the same outcome. So I downloaded both of their demo versions and had another go. It ended up not being much of a decision in the end as TSX simply wouldn’t run on my Windows 7 laptop at all! After half an hour or so I had Trackvision happily importing my logger data and I found I was quite easily able to edit the text based dash configuration files to show what I wanted to I bought the full version of that. After a bit of fiddling here’s where I’d got with my custom dash. What’s interesting is that it’s massively more instructive in terms of analysing my driving than using the log analysis software particularly using the brake indicator to look at braking points and the G circle to look at cornering. This is a single lap from the testing on Friday, I did go slightly faster in the last session but the camera lens was covered in crap. The sound’s rubbish but that’s because of a camera problem at the time.

On Friday I made a start on tarting up all my fasteners. The bolts that retain the bulkheads and subframes along with all the suspension bolts are 12.9 grade high tensile and come in what I think’s called ‘self colour’. It means they’re a sort of black to start with that goes red when it’s been in my garage for any length of time! I did have a cunning plan to replace them all with zinc plated ones to look better but Ian wasn’t terribly happy as he says the plating affects the strength of the bolt. I gather it’s something to do with hydrogen embrittlement – yes, I did look it up on the web and no Ian, it’s not because I didn’t believe you So I got them all together and cleaned them up using a wire brush mounted in the lathe then soaked them in petrol to get all the oil and grease off them. I’m doing to do what Brian’s done on Rob’s car which is to use the self-phosphating paint. One option is to dip them which means making up some form of rack so you can dip each end, they then need baking in the oven for a while. I decided I’m going to try spraying them and on my little shopping trip to Machine Mart on Friday I got a cheap air brush which should do the trick.

I’ve kept in touch with Brian during the week and he’s been fairly happy with his progress on the chassis. He’d been hopeful all along of having it ready this weekend and when I spoke to him on Friday evening he was sounding pretty pleased with himself and was confident it would be ready Saturday afternoon. So I plan to get it back later today after my weekly drubbing by David at the golf course – I have little chance these days, last weekend he played 6 shots better than his 9 handicap despite taking 7 on a par 3. I’m not sure at the moment when the BDN rebuild will resume, or indeed when I’ll be golfing again as I’m having the torn cartilage in my knee removed tomorrow. It’s being done via an arthroscopy and I’m hoping to be mobile again pretty quickly but you never really know.

Before getting going on the IVA prep I needed to fit the revised engine mounts. The BDN uses a sort of modular system to allow any engine to be fitted using the same basic mount sbut with different machined adapter bobbins to accommodate the different engine widths. Ian and Brian think the bobbins allow too much flex once the engine’s under full power causing the reverse gear to impinge on the starter motor so Ian’s redesigned them with pair of beefy machined parts. The lower part braces the mount back to the rear bulkhead and unfortunately needed a bit of modification as it didn’t quite fit – probably because I’d needed to move the mounting hole when I originally fitted the engine. Here it is fitted to the engine mount plate ready for refitting.

The upper part looked like it was going to be a drop in fit but needed a couple of extra 10mm holes drilling in the mount plates. Once I’d done that I had to file quite a bit off it as the engine mounting lugs slope backwards rather than being vertical. Here it is once I’d sorted that and got it bolted in. It certainly looks like it should keep the mount plates nice and square.

I had limited time at the weekend but did make a start on getting the car ready for IVA. The initial stages of this mostly comprised taking things off it. I started with the rain light and the video camera then took the fire extinguisher out. I left the plumbing for this in, I’ll make sure the extinguisher end is secured and taped up and I removed the cockpit nozzle which was on a little ali bracket under the dash. I then removed the brake bias adjuster and it’s bracket then moved onto the cockpit adjustable ARB – I suspect this would actually be OK but I don’t want to leave anything on that might cause an issue especially when it’s not a terribly difficult job to take it off. I tapped a long 6mm screw to replace it so I still have an adjustable ARB, just not from the driver’s seat.

On Monday the nice man from VOSA rang me to get my credit card details to charge me the £450 for the IVA. I later had an email asking me for receipts and photos to confirm that it was an amateur build by myself. It didn’t take too long to produce copies of receipts for all the major bits and I printed off a selection of my vast collection of photos. Since the VOSA main office is only about half a mile from the surgery I dropped them in at lunchtime on Tuesday.

While working on the car on Sunday I realised the garage had reached the point where it was a hazard! I was having to step over stuff wherever I went so I decided before I carried on I needed to have a tidy up. I hadn’t actually seen the bench for a good couple of months for all the clutter on it so that was the first focus of attention.

After some email correspondence with Dan Bromilow, a fellow RGB racer who SVA’d his race Fury, I decided to stick with my plan A on the harness front which was to use the cheap ‘E’ marked harnesses I got from Car builder Solutions. These need normal bolts rather than eyebolts and our local emporium didn’t stock tensile 7/16″ UNF bolts so I ordered some from Namrick. Having cleared the bench I also turned a set of 10mm spacers as the harness eyes are cranked and need spacing out from the mounting points.

The handbrake was next on the list. It works great but at present there’s no compensator mechanism to balance the two sides and the IVA manual states “The parking brake mechanism must incorporate a means of compensation between all brake assemblies operated by the parking brake control, and a means of adjustment to compensate for wear.”. On ‘normal’ cables this is usually done by using a single cable with a semicircular part that allows the cable to slide around it. Having given it some thought over the months I did have a cunning plan involving a pivoting bar connected to the lever via a rod and a small rose joint.

I’d posted the original reverse gear back to Brian on Saturday and the shiny new one arrived back on Wednesday. Brian’s pretty busy at the moment getting his son Rob’s car sorted and I know Rob’s over from Australia at the moment so I wasn’t expecting such a quick turnaround. This didn’t take long to fit then I refitted the rear sprocket and got the chain tensioned.

Friday’s goal was to get the handbrake sorted out along with anything else I could fit into the day. As these things usually pan out it took far longer than I’d anticipated but by late afternoon I’d fabricated new bracketry and got it painted and hung up to dry. Once fitted I was very happy with it, the previous bracketry had a bit of give in it while this is braced much better and is more effective. Lots of folks have trouble getting Wilwood handbrakes through IVA, at least I have the advantage that the pads/disks are well bedded in.

The VOSA inspector rang me around lunchtime to book my test appointment. Unfortunately he was booked up for the following week and was off on hols the week after so it’s booked in the first week of August. I initially booked the Wednesday but rang him back and changed to the Friday – we’re racing at Snetterton the weekend before and I probably won’t be home till late Sunday night which wouldn’t leave much time to prep the car. Also if anything were to happen to the car and I had to cancel you lose the fee if it’s less than 3 days notice.

So this means I’ll need to refit some of the bits I took off. There are still plenty of things I can sort though.

On Saturday I got the headlight adjustment sorted. With them just bolted on they’re pointing just a tad lower than they need to be so I needed some way of being able to adjust them upwards. I came up with a plan involving sticking a couple of rivnuts just below the mounting holes with 5mm screws through them from the back so that when screwed in they push the bottom of the light unit up. This worked nicely and will allow adjustment with the covers still on. You can see the lower adjusting screws with their locknuts in this photo.

I didn’t get much done on Sunday as management had other plans for me. I made a start on refitting the stuff for Snetterton and got the rain light and camera refitted. I’ll concentrate this week on getting the car ready for Snett then try to get some of the other IVA stuff done that won’t need to come off for racing like wiring pup the hazards, making a new passenger seat etc.

Before I went off to Le Mans I booked the car in with Hamish at HLM in Bromsgrove. They were first suggested to me by DynoJet and Austen subsequently went there to get his R1 engine mapped. I was going to go back to PDQ in Slough but Bromsgrove is over 50 miles nearer and I thought I may as well give HLM a try, Austen’s remap seems to be pretty good.

I decided it was about time the engine oil was changed, it hasn’t been changed since I installed it so it’s done 3 race weekends and the Donington trackday. So Thursday evening I removed the hatch in the undertray and drained he oil, changed the filter then spent a happy hour or so mopping up the oil that went everywhere. It’s the filter that’s the problem, it’s almost impossible to reach and there’s absolutely no way of changing it without leaking a load of oil into the engine bay. My long term goal is to mount a remote filter but I haven’t found one yet although I have discussed it with Andy Bates who reckons it should be doable. Once it was refilled I removed the plug caps and anxiously turned the engine hoping not to have a repeat of the air-locked oil filter again. After a minute or so of turning it I did indeed get a few psi on the gauge so I refitted the plug caps and got the engine warmed up and checked for leaks.

I got there a bit early and Hamish was busy with a Volvo on the rollers and there seemed to be some sort of problem with it so in the end he got that off and we got the BDN on. Once the rear bodywork was off the BDN was chocked and strapped down and the lambda sensor and Power Commander connected up. Hamish wanted to get at the rads to direct a fan through them but I explained that they’re fully ducted in and that cooling wasn’t normally a problem so we just directed his huge fan at the front of the car. Once everything was ready Hamish did a power run to see what he had already. Max power was 145bhp with a big dip in the torque curve between 7k and 8k, the AFR was clearly very rich. This was no surprise, I’d deliberately loaded a map with lots of positive numbers to make sure there was no risk of running lean.

Hamish then switched to the DynoJet software to modify the map, it seems the software he uses autoadjusts a column at a time. He did a couple of runs of 100% throttle then hopped out as there was a problem with the water temperature – it was running too cool So one of the BDN’s nostrils got taped up as you can see in this pic. This seemed to do the trick and once the 100% throttle map was done he worked his way down the table through 80%, 60% etc. It was then time to do another power run to see what the gain was.

So, there we have it, an improvement of 10bhp to 155bhp with a smaller increase in torque to 79ft-lbs but a significant improvement in the flat spot and a nice solid air-fuel ratio. Looking back at the graph of the Fury at PDQ the Busa only produced 145bhp although with 90 ft-lbs. So the ZX10′s making pretty good power, at least comparable with the other litre engines – TimH’s 07 Fireblade and Austen’s R1 both made 148 although of course Austen has slightly higher losses cos of the front engine with prop and diff. It’ll be interesting to see how much difference it makes on track, I suspect quite a bit as the improved drivability should count for almost as much as the additional power.

So, with the airbox sorted I was committed to going up to Donington for a Bookatrack trackday. My younger son Chris has been keen to have a go in the car so he and I had a very early start and got there before 8am to sign on followed by the briefing. I hadn’t been on a Bookatrack event for several years but apart from looking a bit older and having gained a few pounds Jonny hadn’t changed a lot. It was all very well organised and although it was fairly expensive there were only 33 cars booked on and we had 7 hours of open pit lane track time available. It was also a lovely warm sunny day with a good forecast.

Chris had never driven on track before and in fact had never driven a rear wheel drive car before. We got the intercom working and got in the line of cars for the slow paced sighting laps, during which Chris got to familiarise himself with the clutch, throttle and gear change as well as the general handling of the car. As readers will be aware the gear change is pretty stiff so he struggled a bit at first.

My main worry was noise. Donington’s really strict with a noise limit of 98dB on drive by, I’d been in touch with Jonny beforehand who reckoned generally cars were 2-3dB quieter on drive by than on static reading so we thought we should be OK but bike engined cars are notoriously a problem. Austen had confirmed that he’d been booted off at Donington for noise in his previous car, mainly through induction noise. It was a bit of an expensive gamble since if you trigger the noise meters you’re off unless you can demonstrate that you’ve made a modification to reduce the noise, but I’d decided that if I didn’t try it I’d always be wondering. So I reset my shift lights from 12,000 to 9,000 for the first proper session.

I hadn’t driven Donington since I had my Evo which must be about 10 years ago. I did come to the Ron Haslam Race School on a bike about 3 years ago but I couldn’t really remember my way round. It’s a fantastic circuit with some great corners and huge elevation changes, the whole section from Redgate round to the Dunlop Straight really flows beautifully. It’s tricky though with some quite technical corners and a couple of combinations that tend to have you coming out of one corner out of position for the next unless you’re careful – particularly from Craner into the Old Hairpin and then from Schwantz into Macleans. Unsurprisingly having Chris sitting in the passenger made a huge difference to the feel of the car, mainly on turn in rather than accelerating or braking and I found I was running wide a lot.

Once the car had had a rest it was Chris’s turn again. He’d been pretty tentative round the sighting laps and had struggled with the gear change but on his first proper session I was quite impressed, he was quite smooth and got up to a good pace quickly. He generally tends to be a bit on the reckless side but he caused me no concern at all and I felt more comfortable in the passenger seat than I’d expected to. He was pretty animated when we came in, he’d found the car easier to drive than he expected and as well as enjoying the power he was really impressed with the handling and brakes, and particularly with the amount of feedback the car was giving him. I couldn’t really see the shift lights properly from my seat and he thought he’d probably gone well over the 9,000 rpm on a few occasions. We hadn’t been black flagged but I thought I might as well go and ask Jonny if he could give me any information. He checked with noise control who said only one Porsche had spiked over 98dB but that no-one else had been close.

So I upped the shift lights to 10,000 and we headed out again with Chris at the helm. We alternated sessions and after checking there were still no noise issues I set the shift lights back to 12,000 and we were giving it the full beans by the time the morning session finished at 12.30. I did get one session on my own in the car but the other sessions were all 2-up.

Early afternoon there was a short but heavy shower so we waited for a while. Chris certainly didn’t want to take the car out in the wet so once I could see it was getting a bit drier I headed out, having driven the car in the wet at Mallory I wasn’t too worried about it. It was a bit strange, it was wet round Redgate, very wet round Craner and the Old Hairpin the quite dry round Coppice and the Dunlop Straight. For a little while I think I was the only one out on track until it was really getting quite dry when a few of the others came out to play.

By 4.30 we’d had enough, we’d been up since 4am so we were both absolutely knackered and we still had the 190 mile drive back. We were both struggling with our necks I think mainly due to the lack of aeroscreen on the passenger side, the padding on the roll cage was just a bit too far back to comfortably rest your head on it. I’d checked the chain tension during the day and hadn’t needed to adjust it, I’d given it a spray with some lube but apart from that and fuel I didn’t need to touch the car at all. I think we used about 55 litres of fuel altogether, so we’d had plenty of track time. Chris had really enjoyed himself and it was fantastic to have had a full day at this fabulous circuit with the car performing flawlessly.

Difficult to say if the airbox had made a difference, certainly the engine needs mapping – it’s pretty snatchy at part throttle sometimes, noticeable several times when on a balanced throttle round the last part of Schwantz just before the braking for Macleans. So the next job on the to do list is to get it on a rolling road.