Oulton Park Pre-season Run
We didn’t intend to test the car prior to the first race at Rockingham next month. Work, holidays and our trackday at Llandow is going to keep us very busy in March. The best we had planned was a quick shakedown run up and down our friends long drive way. But an opportunity presented itself early last week. The weather had been good for the time of year and after a mad rush to try to get everything ready we attended a Trackday at Oulton Park. The forecast was for a dry but chilly day so we gathered a lot of equipment and decided to do some meaningful testing and setup work. Spring changes were on the bill and we had plenty to choose from.
Tony had a busy day ahead of him and we had nearly a 100 litres of fuel to use if needed. James from FF-Racing kindly came along to help out for the day. We sent Tony out for a 3 lap run to check everything over. He was back after a lap as the red flag came out. The car was barely warm so he queued up to go back out as soon as the track went green. One lap and red flag again. This went on for an hour or so with lots of cars stopping on track and bringing out the red. But we managed to sort out a few issues including a coolant leak, the exhaust falling off and a few loose bolts.
We got some decent laps in and got the car settled on the setup we ran in the race back in October. Tony said he could drive the car all day long like that and was happy. So just before lunch we made a big change to the spring rates all round, stiffening the whole car. Tony went out for a 3 lap run to get the tyres warm again and came back saying it felt surprisingly good. We checked the tyre temps after a longer 15 minute run and took a little camber off the front.
Tony was dispatched for another 15 minutes and had started to push on. The car was massively better in the slow speed chicanes, carrying 5mph more at the apex than we did during the race. A couple of more tweaks and we decided to call it a day. The car was pretty much there, tyre temps were perfect and the balance almost spot on. From this point the car should just need slight tweaks based on the circuit. On interrogating the video and data logger Tonys best laps were equal to our fastest lap from the race in October, but with much less effort and a bit more caution due to it being just a trackday. Interested to see how the season goes now.
