I collected the car from Harvey's on Wednesday last week and so just need to say a few thanks:
1. Tony at Turbosystems who found me an inconnel arm for my T4 (something unfortunately Vince couldn't source).
2. Turbo Technics who supplied and fitted the inconnel arm and turned the turbo round super-quick.
3. Harvey for fitting it all and checking the mapping, finally finding the clunking that I have been complaining has been gradually getting worse for the last 12 months (turned out one of the dampers had a pin-prick leak in the hose, so all the oil/gas had eventually leaked out).
4. TG Racing for sorting the damper repair in super-duper time (had to send the rears to Sweden due to a pin-prick hole in the braided hose causing the gas / oil to leak out and make a horrendous clonking noise).
This was all in readiness for doing the Charity Race experience day at Snetterton on Saturday - where it was bitterly cold due to the high winds that Snetterton always seems to suffer from this time of year. As I predicted, it was quiet in the morning, as everyone wondered what a shonky old Ford Escort was doing in the Supercar group, so it was ignored by the majority and people made bee-lines for the prettier Ferraris etc. As you can imagine, after the first session this soon changed and the queue of people that were specifically nominating the Cossie meant that I was busy for the rest of the day
. Unfortunately, I didn't manage to capture most of the sessions due to user error with the camera (ended up turning it off instead of on each time :roll: :oops:).
I'll let the pictures and videos show the action:
Laying darkies out of Russel - had to be careful not to slide into the Ferrari, so was not as yee-ha on this lap (shame he moved on and didn't capture the other laps
):
This one was on low boost with a certain member off the Escort forum as passenger
. It's the first session out, so is in low boost to get a feel for the car and suspension settings:
Snetterton 200 01 - Charity Race Experience 26-Nov-2011 - YouTubeThis one started on low boost, and as you can see that didn't last. The Mclaren MP4 driver was poodling around the corners and so I thought I would whizz past him so that we weren't held up. However, on the straight as I pulled out to overtake, he decided to put "peddle to the metal", which meant I had two choices - suffer the embarrassment and acquiesce and pull back in behind him, or turn up the boost to the full 2.2 bar and cross my fingers that the old Cossie had the torque / power to get past:
Snetterton 200 02 - Charity Race Experience 26-Nov-2011 - YouTubeWas hitting just over 150mph on the straights, so nothing by comparison to the Time Attack cars....
Unfortunately running the ALS later in the day and with the aggressive cams caused some spit back into the inlet manifold, which pushed the inlet manifold gasket out, so that meant that I missed the last session (as although it was driveable, I didn't want to overspeed the turbo and also needed to drive home
).
A big thanks to my pit bitch Ben who helped just by being there, along with driving the Freelander so that we had somewhere to put all the tools (including him when he got too cold
)
.
