Well, a month on and a lot of work completed so far! Mostly mechanical work, sorting some chassis cracks, removing that awful carbon wrap and the stickers, full geo, corner weighting, correcting bump steer (still a bit more to do on that), changing seats, harnesses, tweaking the paddle setup and all the pedals, bled the brakes, new front pads, plus more I've forgotten.
Had it on the dyno... same place as it was originally mapped, curve is totally different and it made 15bhp more without any tuning. Result.
Then this happened and it ground to a halt on the dyno:
So that set things back a touch.
Managed to get a track day in but there were some reasonable niggles, which will need ironing out before it gets used like this again.
Need to do before next outing:
1. Brakes - fitted some Poly As to the front to prevent fade, but their CoF is extremely high. This means the rear is way under-braked and they have very little feel, so I have a set of twin masters and a bias bar ready to go in.
2. Cooling - water temp gradually climbs through a session. I am hoping that ducting in the rad will sort this.
3. Downshifting - it's very tricky at the moment, there's such little feel to the clutch and the short braking distances combined with the sequential box mean there's not really enough time to row down the gears. You'll see in the vid below that I had to brake early, coast on the clutch and it was still difficult to get the downshifts in. Plan is to move the pivot on the clutch pedal to give more feel and make up an auto blipper for the downshift - I dug out an old MX-5 starter motor, so have nicked the solenoid from that and will make a circuit up with switches on the brake, clutch, paddle and dash (to disable it for road driving!). All four will have to 'fire' to activate the blip. It may or may not work, but I should be able to adjust how far the TBs open and for how long, so sod paying over £500 for a 'proper' system
4. Gearbox 'issues' - it got stuck in neutral at one point, then 'cured' itself. I'm not sure exactly how the bike 'box works so this will need investigating... I'm wondering about an old / weak spring or sticky selector fork or something.
Would be good to do before next time:
5. Steering - it's a little more vague than I'd like at the moment, due to loads of play / movement in the column. This also makes the paddles (which are mounted to the column) a little flexy.
6. Dampers - they aren't great. I am sure the seals will last for years but I'd rather have suspension that works
7. High speed understeer - lots of air going under the nose so high speed cornering g is way down on low speed. Car came with a (massive) splitter which need to work out how to fit without it preventing the bonnet from opening.
8. Airbox has developed a couple of pretty long cracks on the welds, Araldite will sort this for now (I had a fuel tank repaired like this for a few weeks!).
9. Having no way to easily adjust the chassis balance is frustrating, it's not bad at the moment but not perfect, so I'd like to go down on front springs (they are about 30-35% too hard at the moment) and make up a front ARB, bearing in mind that it needs to be soft enough to cope with this setup yet can be adjusted stiff enough to work with a rear bar in future. 5/8" solid bar, I think...
Video from Anglesey on Friday:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DWGJZCC-u20So far - it's exactly what I wanted! Fun to drive and fun to tinker with