Shut Up. I'm Talking.

5th Aug 2011

Up and Down start to the weekend

So I am now half way through this mammoth week of karting and so far it’s been up and down to say the least.

At best we have been on the pace and most of the time 0.2secs off. However today was the pinnacle of WTF.

This morning we decided to get a brand new motor in the hope that it would give us the 2/10ths of a second we’er missing. The trade off from this is that a) it costs money and b) we would spend half a day running it in.

Running in an engine involves going slow, fast, slow, fast, slow, fast etc for 30mins. Since each practice session is 10mins it would mean I would waste 3 sessions just bedding in the motor. By lunch time the engine was run in and I was super keen to see how it would go.

While I was running in my competition were packing on the miles at pace, doing some good testing and generally lapping quite quick. With that in mind I wanted to get going but the worst of our fears proved true when it turned out that the new engine was a complete dud. From being 0.2 off the pace we were now 1second off the pace!

To top things off we kept getting a flat right rear tyre. We tried to find the problem and eventually discovered that it was a faulty valve. This was only discovered at about 4pm and the track was getting cold as a chilly breeze set upon us. I was starting to get pissed off so we decided to stick on the motor I raced with 2weeks ago to see where we were in terms of genuine pace.

Luckily it went  A LOT better and we landed up 0.1 off the top guys.

I am still not satisfied though as I feel that we are lacking pace in some vital parts of the track. I have watched some onboard footage of the day and it seems that I can find a bit of time in my driving but there is definitely something missing in our setup.

Hopefully tomorrow runs more smoothly.