Jaguar XJS Racing Christine Week 6

kutuka-north.co.uk

Kutuka Motorsport North

CHRISTINE'S LAIR

WEEK 6

21st July - 27th July

Gloss paint Tuesday evening. With the shell on its side two litres of the stuff is thrown at the underside, underbonnet and interior, then flipped the other way and a further litre absorbed. We’re using 2-pack gloss as it’s hard-wearing, solvent resistant, and shiny. Far lighter than underseal too. It’s a bit poncy to paint the underside of a car, let alone a race car, but it does make sense to us in this application.

The front subframe jumps in on Saturday morning. Close examination of the subframe shows the engine to be on at an angle. The fault lies in the “towers” that support the engine, the captive nuts on the back of the subframe have all broken all the welds, and the towers can then move relative to the subframe. In short, all that holds an engine in place is the 8 little bits of weld that hold 4 M8 captive nuts. Not very good really is it?

Subframe in, after replacing the steering rack bushes with our new solid alloy kind. The regs list this as an available mod for all classes of XJS racer, and Alex made a few sets to outfit all our cars and then some.

At 8pm on Thursday the car goes gloss red. By 8.45 it has headlamps, backlights and a pedal box. An hour off to grab dinner and by midnight it has its rear subframe attached and sideskirts in place. Nobody works at this speed, the danger is doing so means you miss something vital. We’ll need to be very careful, this workrate is foolhardy and we will look really stupid if it goes wrong.

The garage still looks like a Martian brothel with a slaughterhouse theme, or as the Bear dryly noted, any second now Tom Cruise is going to run past throwing handgrenades at aliens.

The Bear lays fuel lines and the electrical mains cable, and clips for the wiring, then cuts the hole for the modified X300 wiper motor. Brake lines magically appear, and the vacuum feed for the ecu, much shorter now we’ve relocated it to the back seat – shorter run, easier access, and it’s not in the puddle they call a footwell like the later cars.

The engine follows on Saturday afternoon, the solid mounts make it a little tougher to get engine, box and mounts, crossmembers etc in place, because there’s no give to any of it all. That it fits is testimony to the straightness of the components, ie proof that our visual inspection was correct.

The exhaust is a joy to refit, a proper man-sized artillery piece of a system, all the better now glittering against the gloss underside. And everyone stays clean, no stray oil, grease or underseal. Only Andrew manages to get dirty, it’s as if he’s been ionized to attract the stuff.

With the engine in the alloy rad leaps into place and we can work out the pipe run needed to make it work in conjunction with the electric pump, which means ordering silicone pipes for the custom fit we need, using a non-Jag radiator and an electric pump the hoses just aren’t the same stuff.

Most played in the garage this week – Red v Blue or Two and Half Men seasons 3-5. Blarg blarg honk honk. Blarg.

Injury of the week – Andrew walked square into the garage door lock and lacerated his back quite spectacularly. That’ll teach him to attempt to work on Jaguars at 1am after a bottle of white.

Helper of the week – despite Stewert’s delivery run to produce the missing parts, he’s destroyed by Mr. David. As with the Helen build Mr David is currently head and shoulders leader in the HOTW stakes.

Week 6, all hell breaks loose, working flat out all hours we're sent, burning the candle both ends, in the middle, in a warm room in high summer under a tanning lamp with a Jalapeno pepper enema.

It looks like someone turned the garage into an abbatoir. Red dust coats every surface like a Martian seaside holiday.

Down on her belly, filler in the small dents we found, and grey primer on the outside, and a full day for Andrew rubbing the whole shell down by hand, 12 full hours of nothing but the sound of wet n dry and muttered grumbling about not needing a gymnasium. The rear panel where the forklift sort of flattened it is still a bit hinky, but we’ll ignore that, you have to know to look.

8pm Thursday

Chief engineer brought a "special tuning" gearlever with him...

Chief engineer has not been pixellated, this is what he looks like.

Clutch is no problem, single braided hose from master to slave, no connections, flexible, done. It’s a £30 modification, but worth it, no question. Bleeding the clutch takes seconds.

Andrew is dispatched back under the car to fit the rear anti-roll bar and radius arms, he does a good job of cleaning the garage floor with his clothes.

Mr David does a complete rewire of the car, redesigned from the Jaguar complexity to a thin ribbon of cable that gets lost in the vastness of the empty interior.

Lyddall appears briefly, bearing 33.3% of the parts he was meant to bring. The new bonnet he delivers has barely been stroked and cooed over like a baby before we put a jigsaw to it to fit the louvres. The bonnet, not a baby.

By Sunday night she’s a painted car with both axles in, all connected, a plumbed and wired engine and box, bodykit hanging on, and she just wants finishing. It was a truly monumental weekend. We did sadly break Chief Engineer in the process, I’ve never seen anyone closer to actual physical collapse as 7pm Sunday evening, but it was hardly a shock, that level of concentration and physical effort sustained for 2 days is quite a feat.

He’s not throwing big pieces of car about, it’s small, neat work that requires thought and planning and is critical to the car actually working. Not like mechanical parts, electricity either works or not, no middle ground, and he can't just hit it with a hammer to make it work!

Four days left. All weekdays, no time off work, it has to be done in the evenings, but a big push and we can have this cracked by Wednesday. Probably. We still have some energy left, we might be running on reserves, but to be fair we have quite a lot of those...