23. First Test Session

The moment we’ve been working towards for a while now.

There were a few things that needed to be sorted before the first test but nothing major really.

•     Passenger seat
•     Passenger harness and anti sub eyelet plates
•     Plug fire extinguisher in and test
•     Front toe
•     Sort sandwich plate oil leak
•     Engine oil change
•     Torque RTB body mount bolts
•     Castor adjust
•     Rubber mount EMU/PMU plate
•     New tyres
•     Rear toe and camber
•     Adjust handbrake park lock

Main thing was to sort the rear alignment out. Started off with 2.5 degrees of camber, 1.5mm toe in LHS and 5.5mm toe in RHS. I tried loosening the RTB body mount bracket bolts off to even the toe in from side to side but just went back to the same place, so inside of fighting with it in future just let it go where it wanted to and decided to fix the toe with shims. So £120 later shims ordered from PMS. Sickening amount for some metal plates but appreciate there a fair bit that goes into them. Not sure if there is any alternative?

So after a bit of trial and error with the shims, changed camber as well as toe at the same time which Nick does say not to do but got it close to start with, I ended up with the below setup.

Really happy with the rear beam setup. Can always add an extra 10 minute shim for a bit of toe out which should equate to a little over 1mm of toe. Then less sure on the front but will soon see.

Stole a seat and harness out of James’ car for the time being incase we both wanted to go out in it.

Then it was time for the big day, both of us pretty excited and couldn’t have asked for better weather (Friday 4th June).

Was £80 for the day, 9:30 to 4:30. There was 2 cars, 1 bike and a drift car so was split into 3 sessions. First few turns worked perfectly just sorting the timings out between ourselves but by 11ish the bike was done so just took it in turns with the drift car so certainly didn’t have a lack of track time. so highly recommend Teesside for testing from our first experience and from speaking with the other 3 people it’s fairly typical.

But anyway, first session out in the car and first impressions are that the car is mega!

Did a couple of slow laps to start but then soon had the confidence to push a little harder. Did about 10 minutes and then came in to look over the car, then it was James’ turn to go out, he too had the same impression.

We were both over the moon with the car, initial worries that we would be slightly underwhelmed went straight away. Didn’t think we would even contemplate doing any changes but had a play with the damper setting. Rear was turned all the way up so set all the dampers to the middle setting and did make a fair bit of difference, certainly felt more planted but was hard to tell as we were only really judging it on one corner. But anyway, here are some pictures and videos.

https://youtu.be/t02NldydMGc

Had a few little issues with the ADU which needed tweaking. One of them being the fuel level was fluctuating a lot even though I had the filtering turned on. I have subsequently worked out that I was displaying the raw input rather than the filtered output so that one is a nice easy fix. Below shows the log of the unfiltered vs filtered, hence the fuel light kept coming on but I’m sure that will be fixed now.

So things were going far too smoothly and eventually ran into our first proper issue. LHS wheel was covered in grease. Was certainly from the outer CV boot but couldn’t see exactly what had happened to it. Both clips still in place so assumed the boot had split so decided to pack up and head home, we did have spare clips but no spare boots, but either way we had had a brilliant day so couldn’t have asked for any more really so a broken boot/drive shaft wasn’t much of a problem compared to what could have gone wrong.

A few other things that we concluded from the day was 100% the next upgrade is going to be a new gearbox and LSD, 3rd gear had the delightful crunch and it felt like the inside wheel was spinning up which was also shown on the logs. So at 75% throttle, vehicle speed was 70kph, outside wheel speed 70kph and inside wheel was 101kph. The other thing that the logs showed was that the wheel speed sensors cut out around 140kph, almost certain this is due to the abs rings, so going to remove half of the teeth on the rings which should mean there will be plenty of margin speed wise.

Car sounded great with the combo of the air intake and PMS exhaust. Couldn’t have gone much better really but a few things to sort before Croft in a couple weeks time. Will do another update prior to Croft with the findings of the cv boot/driveshaft and the changes to the ADU.