Preseason Testing for 2007

Well what an interesting start to the new season.

The build up to 2007 started really late for me, my focus being on a house move and rather too much on the work side. The house move has helped amazingly in that I now have enough space in the garage to work on the car and room to maneuver the trailer. In light of this I have upgraded to a covered trailer so that the car stays clean in transit and does not need to be packed away or loaded up immediately before or after an event, leading to a much more relaxed time around the race day. Due to the late start in prep for the new year there were a few items I had wanted to do which will need to wait until later in the year. Namely the upgrade to the dampers and a replacement set of body work. The dampers are the original steel bodied avo single adjustable which much be well past their best and the body work well how can I put it, is rather tired and has more patches of fiberglass and resin that the base mould!

So anyway to get ready for the first race we (ably assisted in part by John, Tony, Steve from concept designs and Andy from AB Performance) have completed the following.

• Swapped out the old ‘spare’ engine and back in with a refreshed late model blade with fully working gearbox.
• Installed a new AB Performance airbox with near NACA duct in the bonnet
• Modified the bonnet for the aforementioned airbox
• Rationalised the cooling system to make it a closed loop and therefore pressurized setup which has dropped the water temp quite a bit.
• Welded in some strengthening supports to the dash/steering column mounting to reduce flex during gear shifts on the paddles
• Repaired and created new mounts of the exhaust silencer that fell off on the cool down lap of the Birkett 6 hour endurance race!
• Made a ‘NASCAR’ sized throttle pedal and replaced the pivot point on the pedal arm to improve the smoothness of the throttle action and make heel and toe action on down changes easier in a bid to improve gearbox life.
• New grill to protect the radiator

So there has been quite a bit to do and Paul and I did a shake down test at Snetterton a couple of weeks ago to test our hard work.

The day started a little damp which meant we just slithered around but it was a good opportunity to bed the engines in a test for any silly mistakes. By lunch time as the track dried the cars were really flying and although we were not timing, my thought was that the no.4 Fury, as it will be in 2007, was straight back on pace.

A very good test and with some added fun of being able to drive Andy’s blade engined Pheonix (ex Steve Savage RGB car) as well as doing a swap with Paul (current R1 Pheonix RGB car) for a run out.

More on my analysis of these cars later.