With the need to make some changes to the car during the offseason we took the opportunity to refresh the exterior of the car a little and also made a few changes under the hood. Data collection from 2022 and having had a reliable year meant we could take a look at the vehicle's systems with a better understanding of our needs. This resulted in the diff and gearbox coolers being stripped out from the boot and the removal of the accusump system, after the first round of the season these were never actually turned on. Without any temperature issues or any oil pressure issues last season the ~18kg we stripped out were an easy trade off to make. After a minor incident at the Anglesey Matsuri the rear suspension needed some remedial work. So off came all of the suspension, front and back, for a full refresh. The parts were all stripped, cleaned, inspected and painted. The front wishbones got a new set of ball joints and Cro-Mo pins and the whole lot was refitted with a lighter front ARB than we tested last season. The rear required a little more work having bent a trailing arm last year which meant the construction of a suspension jig, something we have been looking at building for another project, we will take a look at the jig in a future post but for now, safe to say it took some cutting and welding to get the arms back into the right shape. We have been doing a bit of tidying up in the interior as in the coming weeks we will need to start looking at removing the old roll cage and fitting a new up to date spec roll cage. All of this work meant a slow start to the season and a bit of a rush to get things ready for Castle combes performance german day. Performance German Day
Once again the weather held up and PGD 2023 was a chilly but clear and dry day, making it the perfect time to pull out our new FPP banner and set up a little show stand to display our ECUs along side the car.
With 3 sessions on track at one of the fastest circuits in the UK it's always a hard event on the cars, during each of the first two sessions we went through a pair of rear tyres in just 6 demo laps. Our logged data says we were sliding at 94mph on the exit of some corners.
During session 3 we had a little bit of an issue, with the car returning to the pit displaying rather a lot of extra smoke from under the bonnet. After carefully removing the bonnet it was clear we were a little bit on fire! 2 dry powder extinguishers later and we had a hell of a mess to clean up.
After getting the car back to the garage and a lot of washing is seems what happened was a leak from the turbo oil feed resulted in an oil saturated insulation blanket on the turbine housing. Because the blanket holds in so much heat it was causing the oil to ignite against the hot turbine housing. Fortunately no serious damage from the fire beyond a new insulation jacket and a bit of lockwiring of the oil feed in future. The slightly more troublesome result of that last session seems to be some missing compression from cylinders 4 and 5, the reason for this is yet to be determined so stay tuned for that one in a future update. For now, what we can say is we have found the perfect engine to test FOME's new knock control system. If it's already broken we can't make it worse.
Until next time, The FPP team.