Many thanks to everyone who’s asked me what’s happened to my race reports recently - it’s nice to know that you care :-)

Unfortunately, things have not been going well. So here are the “highlights” of the last few events:

At Snetterton, we ran the new tuned engine for the first time. Unfortunately it didn’t have the race cams fitted, as they weren’t ready in time. On the rolling road it developed 0.5bhp less than the standard engine. So that was 2 grand well spent then :-) The new close ration gearbox was great though - although the engine still had a large hole in power curve, the new gearbox allowed me to drive around it. We very quickly discovered that the engine was still suffering from fuel surge though - it wouldn’t pull cleanly through Coram (a very long, fast, right-hander), turning into a kangaroo about 3/4 of the way through the corner :-(

The first race turned out to be very short - after turning in to the first corner I heard a banging noise from the rear of the car and pulled off. Embarrassingly, it turned out that I’d failed to tighten the bolts holding the rear sprocket on, and they had failed. We managed to patch things up for the second race, and tried fitting a new fuel pump in an attempt to cure the fuel surge problem. This didn’t work, and although I managed to finish the race I was well down the field.

This event was notable for one other thing - it was the first race where we used our new support vehicle. We are now the proud owners of a “Fleetwood Tioga” American motorhome, with a 5.7 litre V8 engine :-)

The car had to go back to Jedi to have the damage caused by the rear sprocket failure fixed, which meant that we missed the next race. We should have gone to the following race at Brands Hatch, however when coupling the trailer to the motorhome, I noticed that the towball dropped when under load. I looked underneath and it was clear that the welds on the towbar were failing :-( It wasn’t safe to drive, so we had to cancel the event. Apologies to my father and Sallie who were halfway to Brands when they found out!

The next event was Cadwell Park. For this event, the engine was sporting both the race cams which should have been in from the start, and a brand-new set of Keihin Flat-slide carburettors. This combination resulted in an approx 12bhp increase in power, which is about what we were expecting :-)

Qualifying did not, however, go well. I only managed a couple of laps before the wheels came off (and unfortunately, I don’t mean that as a euphemism). It turns out that Jedi had given the car back to me without any nuts on the bolts holding the two rear top-links on. It’s my fault - I prepare the car and should have noticed. But red faces all round.

Luckily we could repair the damage before the race, and the clerk of the course was kind to me and allowed me to start even though I hadn’t completed the requisite 3 laps in qualifying. From the back of the grid, I made up a few places before the race was red-flagged. In the second race, I made up a few more. My times weren’t great, but the encouraging thing was that the engine ran perfectly in both races - the first time it’s behaved itself this year :-) This means that, hopefully, we now have a platform we can start to develop from and extract the performance that the car really should be capable of.

As a final insult to injury - we managed to lock ourselves out of the motorhome and therefore spent a happy 2 hours waiting for the RAC to come and break in for us. Hey ho…