Winter time for the motorsport community is always a little frustrating as we all sit and wait for the weather to improve so we can get back out testing or racing.
To help deal with this and keep interest up, the clever chaps at Straightliners organised a speed weekend with both static and working displays of various special, modified and distinctive vehicles. They also organised some 100 metre drag racing for those that couldn’t wait for the season to start proper.
We were contacted by the organisers to see whether we would be happy to give a presentation to anyone that may be interested in taking and racing their vehicles at Bonneville.
Obviously we were honoured to be asked so both Ian and Andy made the trip up to Elvington in Yorkshire to see what was going on and to pass on our experiences to anyone that was interested.
They really enjoyed the event and met up with a lot of people, they’d not seen for a while, including some friends made at Bonneville last year.
It’s always brave to organise a racing event outside, as we all know despite the best planning the weather will potentially trip you up. To organise an event in the UK in February is really brave!
If we could ask Trevor to organise the weather for Bonneville this year as well as he did for this event then we’ll all be happy.
The car has not been neglected while this has been going on. Bruce and his team have been hard at work with the preparations for this years event.
A sample of the oil from the engine has been sent away from analysis, this will give us a lot of useful information as to how the engine is running under load and whether there are any adjustments we need to be making to the mapping.
One of the major issues, pretty much from the start, has been knowing when we’re up to the optimum engine temperature at the start line. To this end, we have now added an oil temperature sensor and gauge, as this is a true measure of engine readiness.
Slightly more mundanely we have also put four new tyres on the trailer, simply to head off the likeliness of their failure on the way to or from Utah. The tyres that we have been using were on the trailer when we purchased it some years ago and we have no idea how old they were then.
One of the best things to come out of the project has been the fellowship of the team. United by the desire to see how fast we can make this old car go!
At least once a year we try and have a bit of a social event, when we can all get together and just enjoy our friendship without having to repair something!
This year our newly crowned morale officer Ian Glover kindly organised an event in the beautiful town of Walton upon Thames.
The only sad thing about the event was that our friends from across the Atlantic could not join us.
