PHILIP COMER
We eventually traced and repaired the electrical issue, helped enormously by the Kutuka road car developing the exact same symptoms and giving us a fault code to look into. Sometimes you get lucky.
One thing we do need to look into, however, is the diff. It is clearly broken, and it’s time to fix it. The rear subframe in this car is the one major piece we’ve yet to have out, we dropped it only to swap the butterflies, but now it comes all the way out. Once again that motorbike jack is a real help.
Jaguar with its rear in the air. Must be a Tuesday.
What the frell?
I mean, really, why?
In a novel development we actually caught the noisome filth we washed off, instead of dropping it on the floor and rolling in it.
Oh dear. Bear attacked. He tells me this bit is simple.
This is where it starts to get scary.
It just comes out like shucking peas. If peas were really well bolted in.
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Frack me, Bear what have you done?
He claims to know what he's doing with this stuff.
I can only hope he's right.
Same deal here. Reassembled, and he says it was done properly, but you know in his little Bear head there is a nagging question.
All plugged back together. The light blue tinge is not some clever engineering process, it's paint dust that has settled out of the air....more than one car in this garage.
Stengthened, cleaned, and painted.
Could do with a couple of additions. Like the bottom arms. Hubs maybe...
Reassembled.
Reworking the dash involved deleting everyhing.
More of this later.
The datalogger bracket was in no way inspired by Robot Wars.
Occupying a substantial amount of Slough.
It is a Northern invasion. We are too polite to do any serious pillaging.
Getting really well blown by experts.
Taking the subframe apart, however, reveals what we hope will be the last hurrah of incompetence from the old caretakers of this machinery. Very difficult to remove the driveshafts if someone has welded oversized nuts on. The reasoning for this is beyond us. I cannot imagine the time pressure one can be under that leads to this repair, particularly on both sides, it’s not a trackside emergency, this is deliberate.
Sadly removal means cost, because burning off the nut means new bolt, new bolt means a lot of extra work. Bear is on the case. He digs into the diff like a honey badger, and runs off to a corner with the precious powerlock, which then in turn jumps into more pieces that he claims to understand.
No question about it, this one was worn. Very worn. He’s split a few of these now, and it was the worst we’ve encountered internally. You can still buy the bits for these, however, and it’s not that expensive. The expensive part is paying someone to do the work, but the actual pieces are almost reasonable. It is swiftly back together, and ready for reinstallation. We’ve not got a huge amount of time before the next race or we’d get up to a few more tricks whilst we’re in here, but time is pressing.
With the diff reinstalled by the Bear during the day, it falls to me to strengthen the subframe during the evening, so we’re a little out of order here as I’d usually do the welding first. With the whole thing having been thoroughly degreased there has been a lot of paraffin sprayed about the place, there’s the odd spillage of diff oil being soaked up with rag, and in the middle of this potential inferno I now need to do some welding.
Not a lot, just enough to add some tube to the bottom edges of the subframe to stop potential breakages. It’s a standard mod, we’ve seen too many snap the diagonals.
I put Bear on fire-watch, because you get a bit target fixated when welding, and it’s easy to miss the conflagration around you. A minute of welding and a very hot leg draws my attention. Raising the visor shows my leg to be slightly aflame. It is at this point that the Bear turns from the television, and advises that “you’re on fire.” You can’t really fault the logic, I am. And you can’t complain, because he did indeed fire watch. He watched that fire very well. A bit late to spot it, but once he did, nobody could have watched it better.
Welded, ground, a quick lick of paint, and posted back under the car. Reinstallation is swift, and by leaving the callipers behind when it came out, no need to re-bleed the brakes. Fitting one of these can be achieved in about an hour with both of us awake and on our game.
The interior of this car lets it down a bit. We did manage a pretty decent job when we put it all together last year, but that nice satin black has proven itself to be a real magnet for dirt, and there has been a lot of that. Fast body repairs offer a lot of filler dust. Spins and off-track excursions fill the car with dust, and it doesn’t take long to turn a car into something that looks like it’s run the Paris Dakar.
With datalogger cables strung everywhere with tape, wood trim that’s looking rather sorry for itself, the cabin is getting a bit ropey.
We will gradually address a few of these issues, because presentation does matter to the driver, he just doesn’t know it. A new bracket for the datalogger removes it from the windscreen, the suction cups are never a scrutineer’s favourite, and it ruins the video footage anyway. We can then find a hole for the cable so that it doesn’t have to be taped to anything.
These little bits don't matter, but they do. That moment you settle into the cockpit to go out to qualify should feel like a real sense of occasion, and neat and tidy in the twirling and stirring centre offers that sense of reassurance.
We have yet to prove that cleaning up the cockpit makes any driver faster, but anyone who has watched Philip scrabbling about for various camera, datalogger controls, wires, battery packs and his gloves as the engines fire around him, well it does make you wonder how he can focus.
The ventilation system on this car is a bizarre affair. It doesn't work at all. We need to make it work, and it wants some sort of control as to where the rediscovered air is to go.
The dash vents don’t ever need to work again, if the fans are on then they want to blow the screen, not the driver. Getting blown by a fan is something every driver hopes for. If the dash vents are redundant, they’re coming out.
If they’re coming out then the wood’s being lost too. Sad day when you first lose your wood. And that means an alloy panel can be made that runs the full width of the dash, from binnacle to passenger side, permanently jamming the glovebox closed instead of relying on tape and small wedges of wood as the car was when we first saw it.
Cosmetics demand fake carbon fibre is used to cover it, obviously. Whilst I’m on a roll, the door cards jump off, and the seat adjuster controls jump out, and redundant wiring. More fake carbon covers the holes. The total loss of weight is not substantial, this is more about tidying up a bit, but the car is still that shade heavy and I’m not complaining that another five kilos climbs out in the process.
With that it’s ready for Brands, though with hindsight the one thing we should have done is find him a knob for the fan control, because demist consists of nothing but opening the windows, and they are a bit reluctant sometimes. And it rained. How he could see out I don’t know, because at Brands the windows packed up in the heavy rain, and until he got some air into the car with movement, the thing steamed up like his glasses in a sauna full of strippers.*
First though, a trip to the rolling road. The misfire has gone, the diff failed to explode, and horsepower was actually acceptable. It was never going to be significant, but it was, irritatingly, 3 more than my own car developed, and that’s surprising. It does make us reassess a few assumptions about my own vehicle, because this thing hasn’t had, for example, a skimmed head as mine did, because he’s not had a head gasket failure yet, and he’s not got the AJ6 engineering high torque inlet that it now appears adds nothing at all. It’s the same exact exhaust, same throttle, and a much, much more tired engine.
One wonders what, with all the playing around some people do to these with timing and fuelling, could be achieved. Throw in a decent bottom end, and a fully-worked head, even class F could produce some real power. But….at a price. So we’re not playing. Acceptable is all she’s allowed. Cheap and cheerful, that’s our rule. I don’t care what the regs say you can have done, this is an F class. And were it up to me, even this would be too much, I’d ban all engine changes of any kind.
The rolling road did allow me to try something out, however, a long-held theory. Brought the parts with me, did a before and after power run, and was horribly disappointed. Didn’t actually work at all. To make it worse, my playing in turn actually meant I created him a steering issue that spoiled his qualifying and had to be put right at the track. That’s what we call a comprehensive failure.
But the diff worked perfectly. More understeer, as we’d expect, but controllable, and without the lurching oversteer he’d been seeing in the faster stuff. Not that Brands in the wet is all that fast, we need to wait for Silverstone for that.
Difficult to make these big changes in-season with no testing, but it's what we have to work with, and whilst we know what the changes ought to do, there is always that nagging question until it's proven.
The ventilation system, upon further investigation, turned out to have more fundamental issues. It had been expertly repaired in the past by removing broken items and then leaving them out altogether. That does make it tougher to make them operate.
Solution is to finish junking the existing controls, which there is no hope of repairing, and making the whole things simpler. One switch, that turns everything on full blast, air directed solely up the screen. That makes it all rather easier.
Next steps, some more cosmetic fiddling, and we may even finally give him an oil change, look at the plugs. You know, the really advanced stuff…
* I make no actual suggestion that Philip hangs out in saunas, with or without strippers. If he did, I’ll wager his glasses would steam up. Not that he’d get chance anyway, because he’d be crushed under the stampede of Kutukans trying to get there first. Must get a sauna.
The rear panel was scratty, so a scratch and paint, then a little cosmetic amusement thrown on there.
We don't seek permission, we just do these things and see if he spots them.
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