Sensible

It’s not a word one would normally associate with motor racing I know, but for me 2010 so far is probably best summarised that way. That’s not to say I haven’t been enjoying it of course.

Most of my weekends in February were spent finishing off the major jobs on the car and tidying up in a few areas. Even the smallest jobs seem to take disproportionate amount of time to finish, but I suppose that’s because I’m doing them VERY carefully. Part of the idea in racing ‘production’ level cars is that you can get them more or less to a point where you don’t have to do much more than you would with a road car besides increase the rate at which you change the consumables like oil and pads etc. The Astra was certainly like that and I hope this car will be the same. But more on that later ;-)

The next step was to attempt a set up and give it a run. For this bit I was lucky to receive some very valuable assistance from some racing friends who’ve much more experience in this department than I. Loaded Gunn Racing have for a number of years built and run Sports 2000 cars in the UK with great success. Their website offers much more information than I can and makes for some very interesting reading: www.loadedgunn.com In a later post, I hope to cover their progress in 2010 as I’ve always had a soft spot sports racing cars and having had a bit of insight to Loaded Gunn’s approach and the challenges they face, I’m keen to see them do well.

So, the day before I took the car for its first run, I stopped in at Loaded Gunn who performed a full static set-up, including tracking, camber, ride-height and corner weighting. The outcome was very satisfying as the car measured up well and responded to change in the way we expected. We quickly found that it needed little tweaking to get near a theoretical ‘ideal’ and was very straightforward to work on. A big thank you to them then, as it gave me a huge boost in confidence because I now knew I had a good car.

The following day, we took it for a track day on the Silverstone National circuit. It’s not the most exciting layout, but it does provide a good mix of corners, a long straight and a short lap – all the ingredients required for productive testing. It was pretty damp in the morning and the track was very busy, so after a lap or two and a few checks around the car, we settled into a few long but steady runs to get some miles on it and give me a chance to settle in. In the afternoon it steadily dried out completely, so we played a bit with damper settings and went through a simple process to find a reasonable dry set-up. I came away from the test very very happy. The car felt brilliant, behaved itself perfectly and responded well to the changes we made.