REBUILD

I’ve been looking forward to this for ages. It’s all very well playing with other people’s cars and helping them win things, but there’s nothing like working on your own car. It’s a very personal thing, and I know how peculiar it is, but there is an attachment to it. It may only be metal, but when you’ve been through so much with something you do develop a peculiar sentimentality.

After all, I have bled and sweated to build this car, I know every last millimetre of her, and we’ve had some serious highs and lows in the combat of the race track, I even talk to her in the middle of races. It is a disturbing thing, but yet it’s not an attachment I would claim to any other machine, this one is simply special. But that’s a good thing, because that obsession is very important now.

The sheer number of hours I’m about to spend on her is ridiculous, and yet I won’t care one whit. From the moment I get home in this dark, miserable month, to the moment that the clock signals the witching hour, I will toil happily at her demand without thought or concern. There is none of that sense of obligation you have working on a less personal project, this is a proper labour of love. Not in that strange way you see people loving their cars on the internet though, that’s something very different.

Anyway, at last the rebuild can commence., and it does so not with a bang, but with some gentle peripheral work. This time there is a plan, we’re not building a new car, we’re uprating an existing car. I know what she wants to look like when she’s done, and I know what parts she wants to use, so I’m in that enviable position of being able to make the changes I want, and then take the whole thing apart and rebuild it like I meant it all along.

This is all very odd really, she could have a set of tyres thrown on her right now, and go out and win class F, probably comfortably. And I’m going to take her completely apart. I mean completely. Bear wants to look in the bores, and that does mean some work...

First job is to copy down every last setting, weight and measurement off the existing car. Think of this as her backup disc, so long as we have this info we can always go back to it, it works.

That done, she could start to come apart, but even before that there is work to do elsewhere. I have a shopping list of stuff she needs, and that has already been ordered, shipped off for machining, and paid for. The idea was to make 2012 a cheap year by paying for everything in 2011. Stockpiling of brakes, wheels, tyres etc had already begun, at the time of dismantly Helen has already got all her 2012 brake pads, and two sets of spare discs stashed in a corner of the garage.

Spare hubs and wheel bearings, ball joints etc are also stored away. Engine mounts, butterflies, bushes are lurking in boxes in case they are needed.

The fly in the ointment is rubber. Until we know what the tyre is for 2012 I can’t buy any. Helen would have been out more in 2011 if I’d known we were keeping the R1R tyre, because I’d have bought some, and once I’d got a set I’d have used them a bit. But I’m not buying £500 of tyres to find that we’re moving to something new, and that has meant Helen wasn’t out to play.

Same goes for the regulations – I can only do so much without knowing what they are to be. If, for example, the series moved XJS class F cars to more of a parity with saloon class A cars – are we getting Perspex windows, 17” wheels and a 1535kg weight limit? Be daft to build Helen to 1580 again if that were the case.

Helen will emerge from this rebuild with an MOT. So that’s to be considered even before I start. The handbrake ought to work properly, and I’ll need to unplug the air horns to plug in the road horn, and put some windscreen washer fluid in the reservoir in the boot. That aside, she’s already ready, despite certain allegations against her in the paddock she's always been a roadgoing class machine.

The headlights are good already, uprated to serious wattage for the night race last year all I need to do is remove the mesh that protects them from stone damage. This will be replaced with Perspex lenses, with the air intakes cut into them. It will look quite like the quad headlight arrangement, only not quite. In fact I think it should look bloody good, if I’m honest about it. It also allows me to create a nice airbox out of the headlight pod, and perhaps make improvements here.

That’s actually about it, everything else already works. Being an ’83 car she doesn’t need side marker indicators or hazards. Useful.

There are also some changes to make to her paperwork, because on the logbook she’s still a V12 auto. DVLA are a bit particular about engine swaps, even when you’re decreasing litre-age and horsepower, so there is some faffing with the V5 to get them to agree the changes. The insurance company, perversely, have no problem with it whatsoever. I have had my race car insured for road use before, late 2007, and they rank roll cages etc as safety improvements with no weighting to them at all.

The faces at the MOT centre will be most amusing, but we’ll get there in due course.

This move to a roadworthy car will take a lot of the burden off test days, I can check repairs on the street, I don’t have to book a full day at the circuit to check simple repairs, testing can now be half day actual tests. Financially this is helpful.

News that Cadwell might not be on the calendar for 2012 causes a pause in my plans. No Cadwell, no challenge, the whole year is rendered pointless without it. The rebuild goes on hiatus until we learn more. Two or three tracks all year that I really enjoy, and Cadwell is one. Take that away and you lose a lot of my enthusiasm, if you don’t love Cadwell how can you claim to be a driver? This rebuild has to happen, but I must do Cadwell, and if the JEC aren’t going, who am I going there with, and what are their regulations?