HELEN FROM THE DRIVER'S SEAT

HELEN - IT'S A SETUP.

Most-played in the garage this week - My Name Is Earl

Injury of the week - so many, but the gearbox-shaped bruise lasted longest.

Helper of the week - Mr David. Or Mr Dermott, whose camber/castor gauges we have blatantly stolen.

HELEN FTDS April 30th

Pre-Brands

With Snetterton so uneventful, the repairs are fairly fast. A new crank pulley nut and a fan belt are needed, because at some point that weekend we lost the pulley nut completely.

I did ask Bear on the Friday whether his front pulley wobbled, but I thought it was just a feature of a pulley that had taken a knock, I think it was on the old engine that tasted Armco. As it turns out, I should have checked that there was a bloody nut on it, because at the end of Sunday’s race there wasn’t. The clonking and banging as I reversed into my parking slot was enough to make me mentally condemn the clutch.

As it turns out, the pulley had lost the nut completely, you just don’t hear it at race speed, the keyway in the crank had gone too, and the pulley was spinning on the crank, held in place by the belt. The same trick happened to Gregory too, which is an odd coincidence. Happily, the electric water pump meant no issues for me with cooling with no fan belt, whereas his car spat its breakfast out.

It also confirms my theory that you could dispense with an alternator for our short races!

A change to the front suspension settings, I am determined to find a way to save the tyres, and if that means I have to take a hammer to my car to get a bit more clearance for the top arms, so be it. The castor checking and adjustment is one of those black arts I’ve never really got into in depth before, the car has always worked well, but anything to save the rubber.

A front undertray is finally refitted, last seen in action at the end of 2008 I somehow never got round to remaking one. Rubbish really, given it’s a 27” x 9” piece of ally that takes about 30 seconds to make. It merely joins the back of the front skirt to the front crossmember. Thing is, you have to let it be a bit flexible, because the skirt is fixed, and the crossmember moves! If I made it too strong and bolted both ends, technically that would be illegal as it would stablilise the crossmember!

So yes, the slightly heath fitment with the tiewraps is temporary, and on purpose, because I didn’t have any rubber rivnuts. Yet.

Some minor wiring issues, neatening up the paddock fitment of a manual fan override switch, crudely taped to the centre console. It now runs through one of the old original dash switches that no longer do anything, far easier than drilling a hole in my ski slope.

Rear suspension checked out, because there is a minor issue with the bottom arms/uprights, a mismatch of arm/bolt/upright that makes them loosen slightly over a race distance, giving a minutely variable camber/toe.

Then the tyres. We were going to try scrubbing them, but my local scrubber is a bit on the semi-retired side and likes a holiday or two, he just can’t plane my fronts down for me.

My solution, as ever, is to turn to my trusty X300. I just know it wants my fronts on the rear for a week, that’ll plane some of the crap off for me. I just need them wearing square again.

With rain forecast for Brands it might all be a bit moot anyway, I may well be putting that new one on the front corner anyway, get a bit of grip with some fresh edges.

A spanner check, especially the prop, but then that is all for Helen, she is cycled in and out in a day, far too easy.

The Bear is still engine building, and he’s turned his attentions to our stock of broken AJ6s. First port of call was an engine I blew the head gasket on at Mallory in 2007, he dismantles that one and finds it had bigger issues than the head gasket, the crank and bearings are extremely worn. With a regrind more expensive than a new crank these days, that condemns that engine to become just a bare block.

In his hunt for a good crank, next port of call is the engine I ran early last season. Regular listeners will recall the desperate engine swap in the paddock at Snetterton at the start of 2009, and the re-rung AJ6/16 hybrid I complained had no power and tried to poison me. It the same engine that then won at Anglesey and stopped me whining about it for two minutes, and pulled p2 on the grid at Mallory in such great condition that I was breathing through the open window to escape the oil fumes in the cockpit. It also refused to start when hot.

Dermott at the time estimated her horsepower at sub-200, but we never had time to change it, it was only the run up to Oulton park that I released the purse strings and bought the parts to rebuild an AJ16.

Well, now Bear takes apart that Anglesey engine in his search for a crank. The first thing he finds is that this crank is also scrap. And the shells are deeply scored. All are beyond salvage. It doesn’t quite explain the lousy performance or the steam-train smoke production, which we always attributed to screwed bores. For the sake of fun and games, Bear pulls the pistons. The diagnosis is made when he extracts number 1 and the rings shower onto the floor at his feet, number 1 ring is in three bits.

Number 4’s top ring falls in half, and there is a chunk of piston missing. Number 6 goes one better, there is ¼ of the top ring simply absent. We never did find it.

Of course the engine never did get run in. It had been re-rung and stored, so its running in was full throttle straight into qualifying. Interestingly, it still had the guts in it to overtake Drage at turn 2 of lap 1 that day, but it’s not exactly how to bed in new rings, as this evidence shows.

It would appear then that my whining about lack of torque at Anglesey, and later Mallory – 2nd gear for the hairpin instead of the usual 3rd – was actually right. It’s unusual for me to be correct. Quite how potent she can have been with only 3 intact top rings I don’t know. It certainly makes me recall her performances in that early phase of 2009 with a little more warm and fuzzy nostalgia, she won a race with a rear end that wouldn’t behave and an engine that was almost entirely scrap. In fact the dying engine probably helped the wayward rear, we had mechanical traction control – no power!

Of course since then we’ve sorted the rear, and put a decent engine in. Which explains why she goes rather better now. It’s actually very encouraging.

Needless to say, the Bear was less enthused. All he wanted was a crank, not a lecture on how great Helen is or how I actually prefer a three cylinder..