Round 1 - Snetterton

We went to Snetterton with high hopes after winter testing and fired up for a pair of races. I had entered in for the Allcomers race on the Saturday and the RGB race for the Sunday. Saturday was changeable in weather but stayed dry for the allcomers qualify and race with Sunday forecast to be wet.

Allcomers race on Saturday.
We all went out for the qualify session and there were cars everywhere. The nature and fun of an allcomers race is the variety of cars but it does make the qualify session very tricky. For the first couple of laps I just gently made my way around, be careful with the new car and picking my way through the traffic, just behind Paul. In the paddock, I must have knocked the driver side mirror as it collapsed on the outlap, making it hard to see behind. As we came out of Russels three laps in, the engine sounded and felt a little flat and I could not keep up with Paul's acceleration. As I came up to the entry for the back straight, I turned my head around to look behind, compensating for the lack of rear mirror and noticed a lot of smoke. Strangely there was no drop in oil pressure so I wondered if it was engine or a tyre rubbing. I came off the racing line and slowed considerable and brought it back around to the pitlane. As I stopped in the pit lane I could see loads of oil dripping from the engine compartment. Opps!

Engine Issue
Once back at the trailer we set about the task of trying to find the hole in the engine where the oil had escaped. It took a while but we eventually found a small hole just above the clutch on the main block. It would seem that the clutch basket had exploded and a small piece had entered the engine and ricocheted off something and exited the block, followed by quite a bit of the oil.

The hole was low down in the block and the oil had just sprayed out into the engine bay without making a major drop in pressure. Of course once I stopped in the pitlane, it all drained out through the holes in the undertray! Sorry to anyone who found the oil on the circuit.

One saving grace is that Andy (AB Performance) had brought along my spare engine to this race so we did have some hope but this was going to be a touch challenge as we had zero experience of engine changes in this new car. As it would turn out, its quite a different story compared to a blade engine change in a class C car.

We spend the afternoon stripping the car down and trying to work out the plan for the installation of the new engine, made a little more complicated by the replacement engine being a 2005 model compared to the 2000 we were taking out.

As there were small pieces of metal flying around the engine, we had a major task to clean up any items there were needed to transplant into the new installation, the most complicated of which were the dry sump components. We headed home on Saturday night and spent 3 hours in the garage with parafin and an air compressor cleaning out the sump pan, dry sump pump and tank, along with all of the pipework.

Sunday Race
On a very wet Sunday morning, we were joined by Andy from AB Performance and Brian and Ian from BDN to start the install. Looking back on the situation now, we were attempting a fairly impossible task of doing a complete installation of a new engine model whilst at the track side. We completed a number of items but decided by mid afternoon just pack up and retire to the garage and do things in a more relaxed and controlled environment. Unfortunately for all of the competitors on the day and although it did not seem so at the time, quite fortunate for me, the weather was so bad that the entire race day was called off, with the final decision being made at lunch time. It would have been good to see how well the new wet pattern tyre performed but this was we are all still on zero points.

Replacement Week
I will outline in a separate post the items we had to change over and the steps to diagnose the new engine transplant, but the short story is that we spent the entire week trying to get the engine components swapped over, built up, installed, wired and plumbed in. The engine did not want fire once we had all of the required items installed and so started the debugging process for the new engine process being mated to the existing 2000 loom and ECU. The newer models have quite a few electronics to get around to run in the race car, such as power limiters in the lower gears and a speed limited in 6th. With little time to spend in the garage during the later part of the week and a number of failed attempts to get the car powered up, we were left a little deflated. The engine was getting fuel and seemed to be sparking but was just producing lots of back fires with the timing appearing to be miles off.