Llandow Trackday

Having got home from work at twenty past midnight my alarm wasn’t terribly welcome at 6.30 this morning But I had lots to do – I had a load of car juggling to do, get the motorhome ready, get the Fury onto the trailer, pack all my tools etc. and get my helmet etc. together. With the cars rearranged I nipped to Tesco to fill the motorhome with diesel and fill my 2 jerry cans with unleaded. All seemed to be going well until I came to get the Fury out of the garage to find the nearside front wheel fouling the arch. I was initially a bit puzzled but decided it was probably just a low ride height – in addition to sticking weaker springs on the front springs are an inch shorter. I decided to just wind up the platforms when I got there.

There was a briefing scheduled just before 10am with the first track session starting at 10 and it was always a bit of an ask. David and I arrived a minute or two after 10 and everyone was in the briefing. I didn’t want to go in part way through so I got the trailer off the car, jacked it up and wound the spring platforms up. I’d spent a bit of time cleaning and greasing them so I was able to just turn them by hand. About 10.20 they all came out of the briefing and John, the chief marshal there called me over. He did a quick briefing for myself and another late arriver, he knows I’ve been there a few times before and I hadn’t expected arriving late to be a problem. They were starting off with 2 sessions, and the fast group was going out first, so I got back to the car and stuck some air in the tyres and got ready to go out. By the time I got out there were only about 4 or 5 cars on the circuit so plenty of space to get up to speed.

The car felt great. When you’ve not driven one of these for a while you forget how lively they are, how good a bike engine sounds at 10k+ rpm etc.The only minor hiccup was that the gear indicator wasn’t working properly as I’d forgotten to tell the dash it had a 3.14 diff not a 3.38. The car felt noticeably softer, I seemed to have much better feel for what it was doing. Although there will of course be a significant psychological element to this I have in fact reduced the springs by about 12% so you’d expect to notice it really. My main goal was simply to do a shakedown, check everything was working properly. Within a couple of laps I was up to speed and really enjoying it.

Between sessions I did a bit of checking but mostly some cleaning! Correcting the dash for the diff ratio took only a minute and the speedo and gear indicator worked flawlessly after that. I hadn’t had time to clean the car and it was still covered in grime from Silverstone. The wheel didn’t seem to be fouling any more and although I must have put the corner weights out it felt fine under braking. Llandow’s not a very good place to test that though, the finish straight is incredibly bumpy and I decided to back off early and take it easy – it’s a hard braking zone from about 110mph in 5th down to 2nd gear. After 3 sessions John announced that it was now open pit so we could come and go as we pleased. There were probably about 20 cars there altogether but it was always quiet on the track.

By lunchtime I’d done 5 good sessions entirely without incident so I decided it was mission accomplished and stuck her on the trailer and headed back. So she’s now in the garage cleaner than when I left this morning and good to go. I’ll do a bit of prop/diff bolt checking during the week and have a look at the corner weights again but that’s all she needs

I couldn’t do any lap timing but from my video I think I was doing around 47 seconds. I can’t remember what I’ve done there before but am confident it was slower than that. Here’s one of the traffic free laps: