Meeting 3, December 2, 2006
aluminium h profile
Soon enough we were into the third meeting of the new season. We’d worked hard the last couple of weeks and tonight was a big night, the debut of our new 88 car!.
The new 88 car is the original Aggressor Chassis, the first in what has become a line of championship winning cars. This car was the first built by Justin Insley a few years ago, and raced by his brother Shaun until a new evolution was built.
Over the winter we’ve put a lot of work into updating the chassis, and further developing some of the ideas Justin started work on. The car looks different, should work differently and is certainly distinctive. The big challenge for us is to get a grip (quickly!) on the set-up requirements for this car as opposed to our older TCR.
We are temporarily running a Sesco Mopar 4 cylinder engine until the dyno development of the Synergy V8 is complete. The Sesco is a very good competitive engine, certainly a big step up from the Toyota we ran last year. So a good chance for me and the team to get experiance with the new car, and also with a more powerful engine.
Warm-up felt good, first time in the new car and everything was comfortable. More room than in the old car and all the controls were positive and reassuring. The plan for the night was to take things pretty easy, get used to the car and get a setup sorted. Aim was to finish both heats and qualify for the feature.
Unfortunately things weren’t to be.
First race went OK. I started at the back and took things very gingerly after lots of warnings about the engine power!. It really wasn’t that dramatic an increase from the last Toyota I built, but a great spread of torque everywhere, and big burst of power on the straights. I was feeling out the chassis a little and reluctant to throw it around too much until I had a feel for it. It felt OK at this stage, but we were only pushing about 80% pace.
Second race did not go so well. I tried to push the pace up a bit, but it was soon clear the set-up needed work. The car did not handle the bumps well, and had a tendancy to spin entering the corners. When power was applied, rather than go forward it squatted in the back, hooked up into a wheelstand and drifted out towards the wall. Not a comfortable place to be!!. I tried a bunch of things to get around it, but ended up spinning into turn 3, not very happy with the handling at that stage. The car was showing the potential to hook up and grip really well, but also proving she may be difficult to harness. The challenge is ahead.
We went over the car to look for the causes, both rear shocks were changed, and also right rear bar was stiffened. We had new gas shocks on the front and these were questioned, so I lowered the gas pressure as much as I felt safe doing.
The repecharge was better, but not greatly so. The speed / handling was still not there and it was a real struggle throught the bumps, and on both corner entry and exit!. I ended up spinning again in turn 3 from trying to over-drive around the problems.
So a little bit dissapointing the first night, but the car is on one piece and no damage. Some ideas about the set-up learned and valuable experiance for when the V8 engine is installed. We have to have the car handling right to handle the increase in power then….
After a sunday of thinking about things, we came in on monday and cleaned the car up. Spent a few hours on the scales back tracking from the settings in the weekend and getting some new ideas for the set-up. Nothing radical but all pointing in the right direction at this stage, so I think we will be a big step ahead next week. Getting the shocks all checked so at least we have some solid basics to fall back to.
Looking forward to the next crack at getting this car tamed!!
See you at the springs, 9 december.