PART VIII. - FIRST CONTACT

2011 conclusion.

We left Oulton Park with a big class lead for Philip, and a good points haul overall, very much in the hunt for the overall championship. From Oulton the XJS trekked off to that wondrous paradise, Cadwell Park. We like Cadwell. We want to roll in Cadwell.

CADWELL

With the car reporting no issues, we did little other than to check this car over and send him out again. A great race, and one of the best drives I’ve seen Philip put in led to another perfect set of points. An intense fight with Ian Drage, having out-qualified him by a clear second, saw the Dragemobile defeated in a straight contest, Comer’s car clearly faster in the bends but handing away what looks like a lot in a straight line. Given we’ve upped this car to the AJ16 engine, with a big throttle the relative power of the other car is of note. We have to keep an eye on such things. What encouraged us though is that at this, the God of handling tracks, the Comer car is clearly working well, and he drove it nicely. Once again the race ends with perfect points and no damage, the magic haul of points, and with hindsight probably the highlight of the whole season.

Kutuka had inadvertantly interfered at this point, we'd fielded our new E class car, which had taken maximum points at two races in succession, and accidentally tightened the championship right up to put the advantage towards Gail's XJ40, and right into Philip's lap, poor old Palmer without a dominant car to pedal got absolutely mugged, and suddenly it had got awfully close between these three for the Jaguar title we didn't agree existed.

ANGLESEY

If Cadwell was the zenith, this was the pits. The car ended this meeting looking like it had been savaged by a particularly angry lion after at least 4 collisions, fault for which was and indeed likely remains the subject of some dispute. Some minor, some more major, but an extensive repair was on the cards when we’d done here.

Testing had started out promising, the car was good. He drove it, I drove it, the magic datalogger came out and got analysed, and the car was whistling round well, a damper tweak made it less lift-off oversteery, and initial Comer slithering down the corkscrew became a much more measured approach. The datalogger was clear about what to do to go faster, the hills and valleys of acceleration and deceleration were rounded, rather than sharp. Incredibly late on the brakes is one thing, but if you coast off the power for 50 yards beforehand there is time to find.

The car did, however respond well. I thought it a bit flat in 4^th on the power, but partly this is because the car is so quiet inside. And to be fair I still don’t fit the thing, I crash around in that cockpit like a drunk on St Patrick’s day.

The windscreen, thoroughly starred by flying gravel at Donington, is not getting any better, but mechanically and indeed cosmetically we start this weekend well.

The races don’t quite go to plan. Anglesey rewards high corner speed, but failing that it does like a bit of power, that drag from hairpin all the way to Rocket, particularly that long second curve, and this car was clearly outmatched. Faster in the twisty bits, but it couldn’t deal with the more potent machinery. Boy is that a familiar feeling. 2^nd in class is all she can muster, but already for me this is a points job.

Palmer has his new car available, Gail is doing her job holding back the other saloons with a fair degree of brain power in the mix, so it’s not really on to win the title, so class battle is all that matters, and with such a great start to the year we can manage the points lead to the end now. Everyone likes to win, but we like to win big, the little battles don’t matter if the war is already won.

Day 2 goes completely pear-shaped. Baulked at the start and then hit as saloon and XJS squeeze together with Philip’s nose in between them, the big mess comes at Rocket on lap 1. It’s a chain reaction accident when watched on video later, and indeed some of the views from photographs taken at other angles show some interesting things, but whichever way you slice it Philip ends up popping out unsighted from behind a slow XJ40, and finds his screen full of an early-braking Seath, I’ll take one collision to go please.

The damage there isn’t bad, it’s a bust headlight, a bent wing and a few cracks to the front bumper. From our stance on the banking I tot up the cost of repairs, and it’s about £50 if the wing will salvage.

Then it gets worse. After that crash, and having anchored it right up to try and miss Seath, Comers tyres are absolutely shot, I mean we’re seeing canvas and metal when these come off the car, and with no front grip he’s slow. Slow enough that a charging BCB catches him, and goes for the outbrake into Rocket, again, on the last lap. This one is much worse, Comer’s passenger side takes a full t-bone that damages the wing, sill, door, sideskirt and rear wing.

Two corners later, he goes for the pass to get the place back, and with no chance of stopping the car on canvas tyres, finishes off that same wing on Bruce’s car. When the car comes past us on what is now the slowing down lap, that repair bill in my head notches a few clicks up, we know that sill has had a thump before, we know that door has already been seriously smashed up before and won’t go again, and that wing is already full of filler. If that sill is bad, if the cage has taken any damage, that’s season over for this car.

Static inspection is less worrying, the sill is stoved in, but the cage is fine, the wings will beat back into shape, and the bumper will repair. Take a zero off the repair bill. Not the weekend we hoped for, but the curious thing is there was nothing wrong with the car, it lost out due to two crowded starts.

That power problem is of note though, the tracks left are all power circuits.

Anglesey repairs take some time, the sill is the hardest. Once again the car is put in traction, pull straps and hammers drag the sill back into line. The inner has survived, but dragging it all cosmetically straight is no simple task.

The sideskirt takes a repair, and in fact it’s the best that’s ever looked. Both front wings are removed and beaten with my special tuning hammer, we’re now expert at restoring an approximation of the curve of that front eyebrow using nothing more than violence. Filler and paint finish the job, and we take a little more time over the paint this time.

The door has had it, but fortunately we have one in stock, ready painted, and already paid for. The facelift door is much easier to align, this bolted straight on without any shimming necessary.

The door handle is a problem though, this door takes an XJ40 unit. Didn’t expect that, we don’t know our facelift cars. But then the XJ40 handle does fit, but the mechanism doesn’t work, when you lift the XJ40 handle it pushes downwards, whereas the XJS door catch demands to be pulled upwards.

With Mallory looming, and no answer to this headache, a racy solution presents itself. One loop of cable, and a sticker. It works so well that I wonder if we could ditch the door handles on every car.

Crude, you might think, and you’d be right. But it passes scrutineering for the rest of the year like this…

The bonnet took a dent, the impact with Seath under heavy braking drove the bonnet under one of his bumper brackets, and it’s got a dent in the top of the bonnet. Nowhere else, not the front lip, just the top.

It proves awkward to repair, and means repainting half the bonnet. Which in turn reveals the inadequacy of the previous paint prep, because masking off the blue stripe sees the entire bonnet stripped of its paint when the tape came off, it took our blue, the previous silver, the red underneath that, and the primer clean off in giant sheets. It wasn’t keyed to the original gloss coat the car was born with at all, whoever painted it last time hasn’t let the new paint adhere to the car at all, sheets of paint two and three feet wide peel off and create a major repainting headache.

A good look round, the spanner thrown, brake pads and fluids checked, she’s ready for four new tyres and MalloryPark, where the goal will be an uneventful, dull race. Given it’s Mallory that shouldn’t be too difficult, the place is the definition of tedium.

MALLORY

Arrived, departed. Pretended it never happened. A thick cloud of accusation hung over the entire proceedings, the car was quick enough for 2^nd in class by an easy margin, but getting demolished again on raw power exactly as predicted. I have said before and I will say again until they choke the life from me, that Mallory is not a test of skill or the car’s handling, it is a test of engine and nerve.

Plenty of nerve in Philip, the immense spin he had coming off Gerrards proved he has perhaps a bit too much, but then I also know that with a car set for Anglesey handling it may well prove a bit soft for Mallory’s much higher speed, moving from the slowest average speed of the year to what is (just) the highest but without testing or any setup changes is always going to prove interesting. But once again he brings it home second for another haul of points.

Drage qualifies it a couple of rows higher, a great deal of fuss about him being 4^th on the grid, which ought to have caused me some muttering, I qualified second two years in a row and not a bloody peep about that, but such things have largely ceased to bother. Philip was challenging for the class lead for the first three laps or so after another of his demon starts, but then dropped off as faster cars behind fought through and split the fight, and after that he was out of range. Pressing on to claw it back is when the car turned into a dervish.

How close that spin came to causing real trouble we find out afterwards when a rear tyre deflates on the way home. A deep slash across it in two places attests to something sharp in the grass, or a vicious section of kerb having cut down deep into the rubber far enough to penetrate the carcass. Close indeed. Fortunately it was one of the rears, so hadn’t been replaced after Anglesey, rather than one of the fronts which had. The rubber all round for this meeting wasn’t exactly premium stuff.

We know that Philip is disheartened at being out-powered, and we can also see that it’s not him, he really is being out-gunned in a straight line. This leaves us a little perplexed, because we don’t usually tune engines. We make the car handle, drive it like maniacs, and other people’s power doesn’t become a problem. But, even after all this work, this car hasn’t had the three years of development my own car has had, and Philip hasn’t had three years in the seat of this machine, the power deficiency is an issue if he wants to win. I don’t need him to win, I need him to win the championship.

There’s not a deal that can be done without spending money. He's not having a flowed head, and we refuse to cheat and start fitting odd cams, we aren't going to fit a sneaky ECU or start interfering with things best left alone, our ethos with a class F car is that they're meant to be pretty Jaguarish in the engine department. Pulling big power for this class is somehow a bit distasteful, we've never pushed an F class car for power despite all the pleading I did for more horsepower in my own eternal quest to show up modified class cars, we just made them dance a bit harder in the corners and hoped for the best. Needing some more leaves us that little bit perplexed.

Nonetheless there are a couple of things that can be done, and so they are in time for Silverstone, which is again another wholly power-dependant track. We’re confident that we’ve got his car as fast as it will go with that injection system, that nagging nannyish Jaguar ECU, and a totally stock engine. If he gets out-dragged in a straight power fight it’s because there are superior components on the other machine, and we can’t have those without spending. We strongly discourage spending. He's going to win this, and win it on the cheap, or we're not playing anymore. It's how we like to do things.

SILVERSTONE

Close, but no cigar. Faster in quali than his rival Drage, and by quite a lot. It’s a short track with few corners, so to be nearly a second clear is a big margin in qualifying. Have we moved the car along at all, or is the other pilot asleep in qualifying?

Four new tyres might explain some of it, there is no question at all but that these do go better when new, they seem to like some tread depth. I really don’t understand why, but they do. I can find instant time as soon as a fresh set of these go on the car, it’s immediate. I wish I understood the reason for that, but it is true.

A good start from Comer in the race, but Drage is the car astern, and we have a vantage point of much of the track, way up high in the grandstands at Becketts, we can watch and appraise the pair of them. Comer is tidier, a better line and better drive off the exit, but halfway down the back straight we can see that he starts to be pulled in. Finally, about four laps in, he overdoes it going into Becketts, runs wide and loses his drive out of the corner, and he’s picked off as easy as clubbing a baby seal. It was going to require another faultless defence all race long to hold off the faster car, one mistake and it was curtains.

He gave chase, but the car appeared to get wilder on the tail, and we start to wonder if there’s a developing diff problem, the car fading with increasing oversteer as the race continues starts to point in that direction, and it would explain a few things. Second place again. But, that class pole in quali does make a big difference, and he keeps doing it.

Second was therefore always expected, but the cheering news was with that qualifying performance the points continue to rack up nicely, he is in fact still just about in contention for the overall title, and class F is very nearly in the bag. Our sums say he needs just 7 points from the possible 31 at Snetterton to be class Champion.

Slow and steady will, in that case, win the race.

SNETTERTON

With no body damage now for a couple of months we’ve had time to tidy a few things up, and she heads to Snetterton for the last race of the season with a few upgrades.

Katrina did, however, try to kill both of us first. I can play a bit fast and loose with safety sometimes, I will poke my face beneath a car that’s only up on one jack for a few seconds to take a look at something, but by and large we’re quite conscious that when you go beneath 1.5 tonnes of Jaguar, you need some safety measures in place.

Cue this incident. Rear end jacked in the air, and twin axle stands beneath the rear wishbones, which is usually a very good place to throw them. Philip had reported the car feeling as it if had “sagged” or lurched in the race at about the time that he ran wide, so we need to check his suspension out, and that means two Harrisons fighting over the inspection light beneath the rear end., squabbling over who gets to lie where and accusing the other of touching him inappropriately. It’s how it is.

The unexpected crash signals the car fall simultaneously off both stands. We weren’t even touching it, but there it goes. There are no other safety measures in place here, one and half tonnes of car fall on the pair of us. Even now we don’t know what happened. We know to chock the front wheels, we had two perfectly good stands underneath, we should have been safe as houses. Fortunately the axle stands went backwards, and both wedged to differing degrees between exhaust and boot floor, deforming the metal and stopping the car again about five millimetres above chest level, allowing one wriggling Harrison to squirm out from underneath and rush around to help the other.

This Harrison is trapped, being a little larger of girth, and he will present with a wonderful radius arm shaped contusion across the guts. He is attempting to bench press the car, and reports between grunts that the car is getting heavier. Heaving on the rear wheelarch is but a sad reminder that an assembled car is too heavy to lift by hand, and a hastily applied jack punches a hole in that repainted sideskirt, arresting the slow creep of the car towards an expensive funeral.

With both Harrisons restored to an upright condition, an assessment of injuries reveals only cuts and scrapes, mostly what CSI would class as defensive wounds, and four strained sets of shoulder muscles. It was my birthday, so we called it an early night….

Later inspection, with four axle stands, and four wheels underneath to boot, plus a couple of jacks, found nothing awry. Everything connected., nothing broken, including the subframe. One radius arm rubber looks a bit lousy, but it’s had a hard year and it wouldn’t explain the complained-of lurch. My feeling is that he’s just had the Oulton Park experience – Helen held off Chris Palmer at Oulton in 2010 until the diff called time at Druids on the penultimate lap and the car lurched into oversteer – my personal experience colouring my diagnosis.

We’re not going to fix the diff for Snett, there isn’t time or money to do so, it’ll be as it is. We like a full weekend to remove, rebuild and refit a rear end, and that relies on having another diff ready to go. We don’t. We take an executive decision, we’ll up the power a bit but he’ll have to drive round this problem, he only needs to come dead last to win his class championship.

To raise the power we only have one piece left that we can fit for free, and that’s the exhaust. We’re stuck with cast iron manifolds, nothing we can do about that, it’s the rules. But Helen has a lovely manifold-back larger-bore stainless system. Helen isn’t going to Snetterton, so she can loan it to Katrina.

So it is written, so shall it be done. Of course Katrina has a lambda sensor which Helen doesn’t, but we’ll simply ignore that, who gives a damn about economy at full throttle!

The electrics get a tweak, we throw away the keys and fit an ignition switch and starter button. We’ve been meaning to do this ever since Philip drove off with the car keys in his pocket at Oulton Park.

A last look around, exhaust checked for leaks, and the slightly more fruity burble of the bigger exhaust marks Katrina’s final-meeting preparation.

The last double-header at the Snetterton 200 circuit was always going to be nerve-wracking for us. Philip needs to come 6^th in class, and there are only 5 cars in class, so he can come dead last. I want him to come dead last, but he wants to win. I can understand that, winning is nice, we all like winning. Despite the upgrades, this is a power track again, they might have ruined the circuit but it is still about the two straights. Turn 1 suits this car, like Copse it’s all about high speed cornering and good exit traction, the essess/Bomb Hole section reward handling too, but mostly this about coming out of a slow corner and accelerating.

Sadly, so it proves again, he is simply out-matched in quali, and the assessment seems to be that it’s all about acceleration out of that crappy little chicane arrangement at turn 2. 2^nd in class again in quali, and not a damned thing we can do about it save to offer encouragement, and remind him that he now needs to come 7^th out of 5. Big pot, that’s the goal, not the little glasses, the big one.

He listens, but doesn’t hear it. A demon start from two rows back sees him go up the inside for the class lead by turn 1. Round comes the back, and Katrina stops with her nose to the Armco, just avoiding contact. He rejoins dead last. Thank god for that, now stay there you pointy-chinned berk, get the pot.

Doesn’t listen, but instead inexorably hunts down and kills all the other F class cars to fight back up to 2^nd in class, one of his finer displays. Where he pulls such performances from periodically I would like to know, because it seals his championship with some style. From our viewpoint it’s the car’s power we are interested in. It does pass a couple of cars coming out of the slow Russell chicance, and through that’s traction at work, the Kutuka holy grail, it’s got the legs to make it stick in that everlasting drag race back to turn 1, the car is clearly now more capable than many.

That’s it, race over, he’s class F champion. Who’d have thought that when we picked this car up ten months ago and found it to be a deathtrap?

There’s one more race to go, and by reason of his great drive yesterday Comer is actually closer to Drage on the grid, and does him off the start, cleanly this time, they hove into view on lap 1 with Comer clean in front. And then the Drage machine breaks, a lap later and it’s getting overtaken by several machines, and one more sees it chuffing and wheezing into retirement, clearly bust.

Comer ends the season as he began, with a convincing win at Snetterton, bringing the tally to 5. But for some bad luck it should have been 7, but it’s the consistency that did it really, the car has been on the class podium at every race all year, and that is what has given him such a convincing class win, the overall tally is two complete full-point wins clear of the next in class.

We’re calling that job done.