With the vibrations and heating issues finally settled we finally had an opportunity to put the car through its paces and set a benchmark lap time and what better occasion than to do so on the annual historic race, the Passion for Speed.
It did not start off as smoothly as we liked as our first session was put paid to before we even went out. We fired the engine up so as to warm up the oil before going out for practice. No sooner had we got sufficient heat into the oil and we noticed water under the car. Opening the bonnet revealed a leaking welsh plug. A quick fix with Pratley’s putty did not solve it either and we had no option but to go out and buy one and replace it, which we did. That insured that we could make the 2nd session some 2 hours later.
Our second practice session proved both successful and somewhat disappointing at the same time in that we managed to finally post a decent lap time in the 31º heat but it was way off what was expected. For some reason, the engine would not rev above 6500RPM and robbed us of power. Initially, we made some jetting changes and rechecked the cam timing. The last practice session of the day proved to be no better than the first and we were left scratching our heads.
Saturday morning came and with no time to perform anything drastic before qualifying we managed to post a rather disappointing 1:35.4 some 7 seconds off what we anticipated in somewhat cool conditions which if anything should have only but assisted us but hey, we we here for some fun and just glad to be back with a new car for the season. Again we consulted with the experts who suggested we make additional changes to the jetting which we did. That resulted in a slightly better lap time in much hotter conditions during race 1 but still nowhere near where we should be. At least we managed to finish the race and we headed back to pit.
For race 2 we decided to make further changes to the cam timing and we reset the static timing as well. It was also decided that a test run on the side road next to the circuit would confirm if we were now on the right path. Still not getting to its maximum rev range a quick decision was taken to remove the rev limiting 7300RPM chip and that seemed to be the problem solved so back to the pit garage we headed feeling somewhat more confident. Race 2 was off at 15h10 and it was soon discovered that after everything that we had changed we were still not getting max revs and just decided to bring her home in one piece. At least there was a bit of a race challenge and we managed to get passed some of the competitors we did battle with in heat one albeit short lived as on lap 4 going in turn 5 (Cape Town corner) I suddenly saw water squirting out the side of the bonnet and I pulled it straight back into pit only to discover the bottom radiator hose had come off putting an early end to our 2nd race.
We will now spend some time going through everything meticulously and return to try again soon.
