This was the first outing for our car after buying it with no engine in February 2006.
In the morning due to how damp the track was in places we thought we would run on the Uniroyal Rainsport tyres. Big mistake as they only work in full wet conditions.
We came away from the day knowing that we still had a fair bit of work to do to the car in all areas, engine, brakes and suspension. We also came away with a web address :-D . Thanks Stuart :thumb:
What a buzz and a high that day was, even the prospect of the 3 hour drive back to the midlands didn't matter. We had done it we had taken a dream and turned it into reallity, from conception to action in 12 months. No previous experience, neither one of us had ever built an engine before, let alone a whole car.
After a successful day at Cadwell we soon returned to our home circuit Donnington. I remember sitting in the pit lane for my first session thinking, oh great.. I've an elise in front and 2 porsche behind. My hands were sweating, my mouth was dry and my heart was racing. Once out on track
This was the start of many months of head scratching.
We thought that we had blown the head gasket at this point, except for the fact that the car would still drive perfectly on the road. It turned out to be that under boost the heads were lifting
. Not something that I had head of before. Changed the gaskets torqued down the heads to higher setting and away we go again. No cure, fitted a thermostat replaced all the cooling system, pipes, radiator and fans, initially seemed to work but no, problem was still there. Whilst replacing the head gaskets again, Alan put a spirt level across the heads,
The head was warped
We then found out that we had a weak spark, caused by the leads, we happened to have a spare set so fitted them, temporarily improved things until whilst driving the car at night noticed it was running hotter than normal. A quick check under the bonnet and we saw that one of the leads was arcing.
When we checked the plugs we noticed that the plugs on the side of the turbo were showing signs of over heating/fuelling. As this is the same side that the seventh injector is located. (Basically we have benn using the cold start injector wired to a pressure switch to help fueling on boost). This system is far from ideal as it tends to fuel only one bank of the engine, thus causing it to run hot.
The next step was to fit NGK Platinum tip plugs and Magnecor 8.5mm leads. To help protect these Alan has fitted an additional heat shield between the turbo and plugs plus he has fitted heat shielding to the plug leads.
Anyway... enough waffle here is some more footage from Donnington
