3 Sisters, April 6th 2003
A cautious start to the season, this being the first round of the 2003 Midland Speed Championship, and with 10 more events to go, there were no prizes for wrecking the car first time out. During the day I made 5 runs at the circuit. The track was dry, and the weather fine, it was my first ever visit to the track too, so there was a lot to learn. A couple of runs were slowed by gear selection problems. I went from 2nd to 5th instead of 3rd on the 2nd practice and 2nd timed runs, which slowed me somewhat.Times were as follows:
57.79s 1st practice
55.34s 2nd practice
55.35s 1st timed
54.72s 2nd timed
54.26s 3rd timed
The quickest run put me in to 119th overall (out of 165 starters) and 4th in class (6 starters)
Data from the DL90 Datalogged showed that I was quite consistent with my racing lines, just the later runs were faster, with more commitment across the hill and into the corners on the rest of the circuit. The car does appear to pitch a lot, from the camcorder footage it is quite apparent that the nose dives under hard breaking, and the back of the car sits down under hard acceleration. Wheelspin in first and second gear also caused problems with lost traction, despite the LSD, both wheels broke traction quite easily. For the next event, the front and rear dampers will be adjusted to increase their resistance (both are at 0 - lowest setting) and the front suspension will be adjusted to reduce the amount of camber, giving a better footprint for the front tyres. The gear linkage is also going to be adjusted, to make it harder to accidentally select 5th gear instead of 3rd.
I'll also remove the cold start map altogether from the ECU. As the engine is still difficult to start when cold, and it doesn't really need a cold start map, as it's already rich enough at tickover!
Here is a track map showing the layout of the circuit used this weekend. And a map generated from the DL90 datalogger, which uses GPS technology to track the position, speed etc of the car during each run.
Here is a PDF file with the report that appeared in Nottingham Sports Car Clubs 'Spinoff' magazine, and Loughborough Car Clubs 'Backfire' magazine.
Photographs below were taken from the camcorder footage.
Data from the ECU, following the fastest timed run. Produced using Microsoft Excel 2000.
