Unfortunately the car is not quite finished yet as the doors require another coat of paint, so this is a bit of a preview until the weather warms up and I can finish spraying the doors and get all the stickers fitted. I’ll update this page with better photos as soon as possible. However, for now I would recomend you to get in touch with Hitprint via their website in order to take advantage of some great quality work for very competitive prices. Tell them I sent you!

The point of the day was to have a bit of fun to end the year. I fitted a passenger seat in order to take passengers round with me and also to sit alongside Dad and give him some pointers on how to get speed out of the car. It also gave me an opportunity to feel the effect of the changes I had made and I can confidently say it’s a huge improvement! Cosmetically, the car has had the interior tidied up with carbon fibre, a re-spray to remove the horrible bobbly paint and a freshly painted white roll cage and door mirrors. Mechanically, the suspension has been serviced and bought up to spec, wiring loom completely stripped to minimums, suspension bushes have been replaced again, and finally a full alignment including ride height. I’m not prepared to give more details for obvious reasons!

The car handles very very well, it’s extremely predictable and the changes to the setup that I made since the last round of the championship have removed it’s bad traits – which were mainly understeer and twitchiness under braking. It still needs fine tuning as the suspension is much firmer since it was serviced and the corner weights have not been set.

As hinted at earlier, the purpose of the day was to take passengers out and show what it’s like at full race speed. For me, it was brilliant, everybody got the full experience and there was no “taking it easy”. This meant that there was a mixed reaction to being a passenger alongside me! In a straight line the Mazda is not fast, we still got to 115mph at the end of the straight but it couldn’t keep with the faster cars until we got to the corners where it would catch very quickly the Porche’s and BMW M3′s. Two reasons; they are probaby aren’t race prepared cars and also not driven by somebody with as much track experience, however they are twice as powerful and cost £40,000+ more than the little Mx5 which is always great to remember as you hunt down the next car owned by somebody with all the gear but no idea.

Main photo found on Flickr by jrw1982, and others were purchased from Xtreme Sports Photography or taken myself.

The top eight of the thirty drivers on the day go through to the A Final based on points scored during the heats. With two wins and a second amongst some of my results from the five heats I started 6th in the A Final, with none other than Rhys alongside in 7th (we were tied on points). An extremely close and physical race saw me move up to third and claim myself a step on the podium. It was a really enjoyable evening and I met some great people who I am sure i’ll see again in the future. Video below (i’m wearing my blue and white karting suit and ususal white crash helmet).

I really can’t thank Phil enough for allowing us to spend a couple of hours on a Sunday to get the weights right, and I hope that it will improve the handling of the car further. All thats needed to do now is re-check all the camber and caster values that may of been affected by the changes. A job for later in the week! We worked on the principle of acheiving 50% weight across the diagonals which seems to be regarded as the accepted method. It didn’t seem like a huge change to the car for the time involved but then alignment often seems like that until you can see the results on track.

It’s hard to tell just how quick we were, and we’ll have to wait for the weekend for that, however people are not driving away from me anymore and I was holding the pace of people who run much further up the grid. Best time of the day was a 59.6, Rhys got down to 59.0 so that’s the closest we’ve been all year. I’ll be heading back to Brands tomorrow to check out the competition and see if I can pick up any more tips!

The final figures were 125.7 bhp @ 6577 rpm with 106.8 lb-ft torque. To be completely honest, I don’t know if this is good or not, as we don’t have a reference point other than with Rhys who seems to have more torque. The performance seems reasonable to me, given that a standard engine is 115 bhp and 100 lb-ft torque when new (not 20 years old!). We also had concern that the engine was running lean because the spark plugs were really white, but we concluded this could be a result of not running super unleaded fuel despite having advanced the ignition timing, as the dyno suggested the mixture was about right.

Dyno Print Out (click to enlarge)

So whats next? I really want to move away from being a midfield runner, and start finishing in the top 10. We have new scrubbed tyres for the next round on the 23rd July and pyschologically I know that the car seems capable. We won’t be able to test before so again i’ll have to learn the track in qualifying which is not ideal, but i’ll just have to push it as hard as I can and see what results I can get!

We have decided to go all out and hope we can correct the issue and gain speed at the same time by having a multi-angle cut done on the valves. This should make them seal tight, bringing the compression back up at the same time. The multi angle cut also should give a bit extra performance, although to be honest just having a good seal would do the same but if the opportunity is there, we might as well take it. All the work is being done by HT Racing near Brands Hatch who were the company who skimmed the cylinder head also.

The only worrying thing that Trevor discovered was the shiny mark on the edge of one of the pistons, suggesting that the cylinder head and piston are coming in contact with eachother. They must be just touching otherwise it would of blown up by now! When we rebuild it we’re going to use a bigger head gasket to try and increase the gap.

Piston with shiny mark at the top from contacting the cylinder head

We took the cylinder head off to investigate further, and whilst doing so confirmed that the cam timing was correct so this was not an issue. Putting fluid in all of the cylinders and in the cylinder head to check for leaks revealed that the piston rings seem fine and we have a valve issue. I was glad in some respects that it is a problem with the cylinder head as any issues with the bottom end of the engine would involve taking the whole engine out and that means even more work to fit into a short time scale.

We have three issues to solve; poor compression, high oil consumption and smoke on decelearation. The last point is illustrated during the video below (camera car is two places behind me).

My experience as an engine builder is zero, it might be painfully obvious but I can’t see it at the moment. It seems to me like quite a precision part of the car to be messing about with and the potential to make things worse is enormous. I’ll update this with any more information as we progress.