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197 days ago
Update - Colerne 4th May & Llandow 9th May After the Clay Pigeon sprint there has been a bit of a break in the season, but May is very busy, and last week I did 2 sprints in 5 days. The first, on the may day bank holiday, was at Colerne airfield, a course I'd not competed at before, and the second was at Llandow in south Wales, where I had entered my first ever sprint in May 2008. So, Colerne first, and an account of what was the toughest day's motorsport I have yet encountered. Firstly, the car had been having mechanical issues in the week leading up to the event, to the point where I wondered if I was going to make it to the track at all, and this had left me feeling very underprepared for the event - a particular problem as I'd not driven Colerne before, or even done an airfield sprint that would be similar. The sprint circuit at Colerne is completely different to the trackday circuit they run there, and it's very, very fast, with long straights and one right hander in ...
212 days ago
So after the success at 'Combe it was time to get ready for the next event at Clay Pigeon Raceway near Dorchester. This was stepping out of my comfort zone a bit as it was the first event I have attended that was not organised by Bristol Motor Club, so my attendance was purely down to the ASWMC championship. In addition, Dorchester is a couple of hours away from home for me, so rather than getting up early for a long day we made the decision to camp at the circuit the night before the event. Clay Pigeon is an outdoor cart track, but is a world away from the indoor commercial cart tracks that most people know and love. It's still tight, but it's more like a full size circuit F1 circuit, put through a mangle and sqeezed to 20% of it's original size. There are a multitude of corners, not just tight hairpins, although in a full-sized car the tightness and lack of width means that 2nd gear is used for almost all of the lap. This also makes it pretty technical, so walking the circuit was ...
239 days ago
Well after nearly a full week of watching Metcheck, BBC and any other weather websites I could think of to try and guess what the weather would do, last saturday was the day of the Great Western Sprint at Castle Combe, the first event of 2009 for me and the rest of the Bristol/South-West sprinting gang. I was very keen to get to Combe and see what effect, if any, the upgrades over the winter were going to have, but I knew full well that a rainy day would take away almost all of any advantage I'd managed to grab over the winter, especially over the usual 4wd suspects of the Lancer of Dave Greenslade and the Mazda 323 turbo of Graeme Palmer. So I was hugely relieved when I woke up (at 5:45am to watch the F1 qualifying before I went - well done Jensen!!) to find a cold, blustery, but dry morning. After getting pipped to 1st in class by just 0.19sec at last years end-of-season Pegasus sprint, I'd been mindful the night before when filling the car up with Tesco 99 fuel, only ...
261 days ago
The GAZ suspension kit has now been fitted. It's not a particularly hard job, just 2 bolts on each unit, but it's quite difficult to get the ride height set correctly. That's still in progress at the moment as the springs take a while to settle once fitted. Hopefully it'll be fully sorted next weekend. There are a few pics showing the state of the old Bilsteins in the albums, the springs were starting to corrode and the mounts had seen better days, so I think they were definitely due for a replacement anyway!! There's a lot of damper adjustment available. The springs are much stiffer than before, but the difference in ride-quality isn't that different from the OEM Bilsteins from before. There's a lot more grip, and a lot less body roll, but it's not uncomfortable over bumps apart from at very low speeds. At the moment I've got the dampers set at 15 clicks on the front and 25 on the rear (from full soft, out of 40), which has resulted in a lot of grip and feels very adjustable. The ...
282 days ago
It's been a while since the Pegasus Sprint now, but that 2nd place has really got me fired up for the new season. I think it's been more motivational than if I'd won! II've made the step up and entered the 2009 Association of South-West Motor Clubs (ASWMC) Sprint Championship, the first event of which is the Great Western Sprint at Castle Combe, organised by my home club, Bristol MC. The regs were published over the valentines day weekend and I'm intending to send them today, so I'm hoping that I'll get an entry and a good start to the season. The Great Western isn't one of the events I did last year, but it's very unusual in that the course is nearly 2 whole laps of the Castle Combe circuit, and so it is well over 3 miles long! The weather last year was apparently absolutely awful, but as always at 'Combe the speeds were high, the A3 class winner coming in at 188.97seconds in a Renault Clio 182 - an average speed of about 63mph, not bad considering the weather! My car has passed it's ...
