BDN - First Test

Snetterton, Saturday 15th Dec. Cold but dry and almost sunny at times.

Aims

1. Shake down of car although not expecting any major issues, we had made a new seat, modified the steering position, dash mountings and break pedal setup so there were items that needed testing.
2. For me to get used to the car and its basic balance, increased power over the Fury
3. For John to get used to the operational support side of the car, ease of turnaround from a session (fueling, visual checks, ease of access, bodywork removed etc
4. For us to gather some basic information as to suspension changes and the resulting feel of the car.
5. Initial weigh in
6. Feel and running of the car in cold conditions (oil and water cooling) as it may be like this at snett in March for the first race.
   

Shake Down went brilliantly.
We spent a few short sessions just getting used to the car and finding a good starting point for the brake bias. Steering position is great, small padding area needed for left arm, dials all accessibly, telemetry working. The seat is good but I could do with more side of leg support as well as a better clutch foot rest for the high speed corners.

Basic Balance
Very good, in fact I got into the swing very quickly and was able to try lots of different styles. Balanced is a good word for the car, I do of course need to get more used to the added speed and therefore the larger amount of time spent slowing down as well as the ability to use the wider power band to smooth my inputs. A good example of this is the first corner at Snett. Initially I was going from 6th down to 4th for this corner, running a good line through, on the power for the 2nd apex and full throttle from there to the braking zone for the 2nd corner. Arriving at that braking zone at the top of the rev range for 4th gear. This felt good but gave a lot of work to get down 2 gears before turning in to the first corner. After chatting with Paul I tried going down just 1 gear, carrying more speed into the first corner and using the extra pull of the ZX12 out of the corner and found myself arriving at the braking zone for the 2nd corner considerably faster! Now of course that leaves me more work to do for that 2nd corner but hey!
All of this is just observational at the moment as I am yet to download the telemetry let alone compare to Robs data from the 2007 season.

Operational side – well we found it takes a little practice to remove the rear body work and this is a common activity as its needed for every refuel. We may alter this but for now we either need to bond in the fastener sockets as they ping out when you remove the bodywork or change to using a different type of clip as used on the front bodywork. Re-fueling is easy especially with the new setup we have. It uses quite a bit more fuel though so we need to get used to that and we now have a good way of measuring the fuel level so I can calibrate this in the garage over the next few weeks.

Setup
At the end of the day, we made some basic suspension changes, mainly focusing on the front dampers and gained the results we expected which was great. We tested full stiffness on the front dampers and then a middle ground as the base setup was almost at full soft on the front. Our next change will probably be to change the rake of the car, adding some forward weight and seeing what effect that has on aero balance as well.

• Initial turn in gets my thumbs up.
• From there to apex is a little pitch sensitive for my liking but there are quite a number of options, including trailing throttle to work the rear a little more.
• Apex to exit is again very good, maybe a little soft in roll for the dry but I need to try a more technical circuit to be sure its not just masked by grunt!

Post Christmas Diet needed?
Weigh in was excellent, with almost zero fuel we are well under the min weight so we can either used extra fuel in reserve as ballast and give some margin for red flags/restarts etc (tank is foam filled and in the centre of the car so no movement or balance issues) or we can use ballast to help corner weights.

Cold Weather
In the 4deg weather we had at Snetterton we needed to partially block the water radiator at the front as well as the oil cooler mounted in the passenger side pod so as to get any decent operating temperature! Tyre temperature was not difficult to achieve and was more balanced on cold tyres than the Fury used to be.

So overall a very good day was had. Car worked well, it has given us the confidence to continue on with some of the upgrades we want to do over the Winter period and I am lookind forward to 08!