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4th October 2009
What a week! We’ve completed the Britcar Silverstone 500, gained 3rd overall in the 2009 Britcar Production Championship maintained our 2nd in Class. The last 7 days have been a bit of a rollercoaster and there’s still Brands Hatch to go!
Our regular driver, Alan Bonner was not going to be with us for the weekend as he had been offered a drive in the Xero Competition Corvette (a car in with a good chance of an outright win). Because of this we had partnered Cassey Watson with Rob Hedley and Ian Stinton. Unfortunately, with 7 days to go before qualifying for the Britcar Silverstone 500, we had a driver pull out. The cost of entry was a little too high to allow Cassey and Rob to cover Ian’s contribution, so our entry was very much in doubt. Another bit of bad news was that we were due to be trying a new programmable ECU, but the “next day” HT leads were 3 days late. We finished the week before our biggest race of the season with no engine upgrades and no entry.
Our new gearbox turned up from Quaife with 4 days to go and was assembled that evening and fitted to the car the following day. Unfortunately, when we tested the gearbox, we only had four gears. As you can imagine, a Quaife straight cut gear kit caused a lot of fuss in the workshop so I can’t tell you when the 5th gear synchro hub was put on back to front; and yes, it should have been checked, but we were a little pre-occupied with finding a replacement for Ian.
Due to our entry being in doubt up to the eve of qualifying, the following activities occurred on Thursday. The gearbox was refitted (giving us all 5 gears), the rear suspension was rebuilt with the new Powerflex bushes, the transit was loaded with spares, the car was given a full suspension overhaul, the standard ECU was re-fitted (due to lack of HT leads), new teamwear was collected…………………Oh, and we were approached by two drivers, Peter Fairbairn and Paul Mclean. We were going to Silverstone, but at 1am on the morning of qualifying we though that we’d have a few hours sleep first.
Friday’s two qualifying sessions (one day and one night) ran smoothly, but we need more power. The data logger shows that we have the fastest cornering speeds in the championship, but on a track with two long straights we were 10 seconds per lap off the pace. We qualified 41st out of 42, but up against teams who had spent more on their tyres than we had on our engine.
The race was always going to be difficult as having 4 drivers required 3 stops, but the optimum strategy was two stops. Mind you, with our lack of straight line pace, it wouldn’t make much difference. We had to simply hope for our competitors to have reliability issues. Peter took the first stint which ended with a power steering hose failure; quickly replaced by the students. Rob returned the car to the track, but returned to the pits quickly due to poor visibility. Our luck wasn’t about to change and a one second error on our pit stop timing (we are required to stop for 90 seconds, but stopped for 89) lead to a 2 lap penalty. Rob’s stint in the car ended with the sun setting and rain over the far side of the circuit. With Silverstone half wet and half dry, we put Paul out on slicks. This was the hardest stint as the weather became worse, but still not bad enough to justify a change to wets. Towards the end of Paul’s stint, a crash lead to the safety car being out on track. This would have been perfect for a driver change, but you are only allowed to add 25 litres of fuel during a safety car period. We decided to do the final driver change and refuelling stop straight after the safety car period. The safety car normally does one lap without flashing yellow lights and then comes in. However, it unexpectedly did two laps. We’d already called the car in so we could only put in 25 litres. Cassey drove the final stint, but things didn’t go too smoothly as she found herself stuck behind a Porsche and then had to make one more stop to put on enough fuel to get us to the end of the race.
We finished 32nd; ahead of a Mosler, three Porsche 996’s, two Prosport LM3000’s, a Honda Civic, a Lotus Elise, and an E-Type. This is a great result, made possible by the fantastic work done by the students to prepare the car and their professional approach to the whole weekend. We really have the best team on the grid. I also want to add that for once the race was also a little special. Racing at night adds a certain buzz and where I’m normally only interested in working with the students, this race had something extra. It’s now on to Brands Hatch for the 7th of November, the last race of a wonderful season (and also racing into the night). |
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31st August 2009
In summary, it was a difficult weekend which has resulted in our worst finish of the season, 3rd in Class. It was never going to be easy with the LR1a having the lowest power output on the grid and Snetterton being a circuit where power is king. However, we are still running 2nd in class and 5th overall in the championship. We’ve also produced some of the best motor vehicle students in the country. When you’re disappointed with 3rd, it’s a not a bad thing!
The weekend started with a difficult practice session on Friday with a snapped a front wheel stud. However, the students actually love the pressure and swapped the front upright to allowing the car to allow Alan to finish the final practice session of the day.
Our second problem of the weekend came during qualifying when the safety came out with Alan only completing 4 laps. This forced out hand into changing drivers earlier than planned. After a few flying laps, Cassey returned to the pits with vibration problems. The vibrations were caused by 2 snapped wheel studs. We obviously had a bad batch of wheel studs! We had already used our spare upright and with 1 hour to the race we had a problem on our hands. The students had to pick the best wheel studs and build up an upright. This was done quite comfortably, but with a 2 hour race ahead of us, it wasn’t necessarily a cure to the problem.
Alan started the race, but we had over fuelled the car which lead to slow lap times. The 888 Solutions Honda Accord had an engine failure, but we couldn’t live with the straight line speed of the 888 Solutions Civic (1st) or the Renault Clio (2nd). As the fuel load came down, we started to catch the 2nd placed Clio and we were confident that we could finish the race 2nd. With the Clio now 30 seconds ahead of us and with about 8 laps of Alan’s stint remaining, the safety car came out. We were approaching the pit lane, and made a quick call to change drivers. With hindsight this was not the best call. The safety car stayed out longer than expected and we should have made the best of the fuel load and stayed out longer. Either way, after the dust of pits stops and safety cars had settled, we were 46 seconds behind the Clio, but lapping 2 seconds faster with plenty of time to go.
Things then started to go wrong. Cassey radioed in with lack of grip and the car wandering on the straights. She was called into the pits to allow the students to check the car. There was nothing loose, but it felt like the diff was having its last race. We were now too far behind the Clio to catch it, but a very safe 3rd. All we had to do was finish the race. Cassey went back on track and nursed the car for the rest of the race. By the last lap, we’d lost 5th gear and the increased tyre wear caused by a faulty diff lead to us running on canvas. With all our problems, we were happy to settle for third. |
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10th August 2009
I’d spent the week before Castle Combe on holiday with no phone or internet access. In holiday terms, this was wonderful, but in preparation for a race weekend with two new drivers and a team returning to action following a long break, it was not so good. I also had to run an errand to Leeds and catch a lift back with my Dad on the day we were due to set off. The aim was to arrive at Bedford College at 1pm to collect the students, but my Dad is on an economy drive and so I didn’t get to Bedford till 3pm (Dad got good mpg though).
With the students on board the transit, we set off for our new team base at Rockingham to collect the spares, pit equipment and our new team vehicle (coach converted into a camper). Cutting a long story short, we finally left Rockingham Motor Speedway with an estimated Castle Combe arrival time of 22:10. Our new Scottish ace, Alan Bonner, was due to be picked up from Bristol Airport at 22:00 so things weren’t quite going to plan.
Castle Combe was due to be a long weekend with official testing on the Thursday, free practice and qualifying on the Saturday and the race on the Sunday. Thursday’s testing didn’t really work much better for us. We had one good session for Alan to familiarize himself with the LR1a and re-familiarize himself with the track, but then the rain came! We did manage another run in the wet and had some very competitive times, but the weather forecast showed a need for slicks with a few heat cycles in them and we had a set of slicks with no heat cycles through them.
Friday was a little unusual with a bit of a scout camp feel to it. There was very little for the students to do as the car was ready for Saturday, so we opted for a trip to the local Tesco for supplies (we’d been told that there was one down the road) and some pit stop practice for the team. 12 hours later we returned from Tesco’s……………………………
Saturday was a welcome return to action for the team. We started the morning’s free practice with 3 flying laps with the new slicks to give them a heat cycle (more heat cycles would improve the life of the tyres). The tyres were then swapped to an old testing set in amazing pit stop by the students (much quicker than our trip to Tesco’s). They performed like a team who had been doing this for years and not 6 months! Qualifying was not as successful as we failed to get to grips with the tyres (pardon the pun). The track temperature had risen to 40 degrees causing the tyre pressures to rise by a massive 12psi; there simply wasn’t the level of grip that we’d been expecting. As a result Cassey only managed a 1.18.862 and Alan managed a 1.20.354; giving us a 31st out of 33 grid position, and 4th in class.
We spent the rest of Saturday trying to work out how to avoid the tyre problems of qualifying in order to maintain our run of finishing second in class. However, the power advantage of the two 888 Solutions cars gave them an intimidating advantage. We had a very cunning plan however. If we managed to resolve our tyre issues, our handling advantage over our more powerful rivals would allow us to make a few places at the first corner. Unfortunately, three things got in the way of a successful completion of this cunning plan. Firstly, the cars allowed themselves to become too spaced apart on the rolling start (we’d only be able to jump one place). Secondly we hadn’t totally resolved the tyre problem, which lead to the third problem of Alan getting a bit sideways at the first corner……We crossed the start line last.
Alan brought the car in after 27 laps with a best lap of 1.20.696, the students did a faultless job with the refueling, which is more than can be said of team 888 with their Accord who received a 2 lap penalty for a refueling infringement. This really emphasizes the superb job our students are doing when a professional team shows how difficult it is under pressure.
Cassey took to the track 4th in class, 34 seconds behind the Renault Clio and 2 laps behind the 888 Civic. The second part of the race was all about passing the Clio to finish 2nd in Class. Lap after lap Cassey gained on the Clio setting a best lap time of 1.18.626 and finally passed it, quickly opening a gap. She also managed to unlap the Civic.
This was another fabulous result for the team and one that really had to be earnt. With the new driver line up we are a massive 4 seconds closer to the fastest cars in class, so we will now work on the car to try and close the remaining gap in time for Snetterton. |
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4th June 2009
Whilst things have been quiet, there’s been a great deal of behind the scenes activity. The first bit of big news is that we will be working with two new drivers for Castle Combe (8th August). The first driver to be welcomed to the team is 17 year old Cassey Watson (www.casseywatson.co.uk). She introduced herself to the team at Bedford College on 1st June and was putting the LR1a through its paces at Castle Combe on the 4th June.
Whilst Cassey is currently running 2nd in the Maxda MX5 Championship, we didn’t really know what to expect, and I am sure that Cassey didn’t know what to expect from a car built and maintained by children. With the car unloaded and made ready for the test and perfect weather conditions, Cassey took to the track. Our previous visit to the track with the LR1 producing a 1:24 lap time, it was now a case of wait and see what Cassey and the LR1a could produce.
Within a few laps, she was down to 1:19 and then proceeded to put in a number of very consistent 1:18’s. As you can imagine, we were delighted! More important than her pace however, is the level of feedback and maturity as a driver. Its always difficult getting the most out of a car without experiencing first hand what the car is doing through different corners. We have to rely on information from the driver. Her level of feedback is comparable to a much more experienced driver. It’s great to be a part of what will be a successful motorsport career.
Not to be out-done by our new driver, the students also had their chance to shine. We had a gearbox bearing collapse during the second session of the day and I genuinely though that it was game over. However, the students simply got on with the task in hand, removed the gearbox, stripped it, sent Eddie off to find a new bearing, rebuilt the gearbox and refitted it. The car was running again by the end of the day. I was simply reduced to passing students spanners when asked. If this wasn’t enough, the car ran faultlessly for a second day of testing on the 5th, with no leaks from the gearbox. I know for a fact that there are many professional race teams (who employ experienced adults) who cannot match this. To quote Paul Watson (Cassey’s father) “I presumed the students would just be watching and learning, but in fact they already have been taught to a level of skill and knowledge that I was amazed to see from such a young group. What was then even more astounding was my daughter then took to the track and drove the car extremely hard and not only did it complete over 100 laps with no problem, the gearbox never needed anymore attention at all, not even for an oil leak which any team could usually expect in the circumstances.”
The project is working! |
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3rd May 2009
With success of Silverstone behind us, we arrived at Rockingham at about midnight on Thursday with the car ready for the weekend. Well, to be honest Eddie and some of the students arrived then; I took the tougher option of bringing the rest of the team up for 9:30am Friday morning.
Whilst being 2nd in the championship has many benefits, it also comes with the increased pressures brought by increased expectations. The problem is that for most of the track the driver is simply a passenger who presses the accelerator. The banking on the curve at Rockingham makes it work as a very long straight so quick times depend upon high horsepower (something which we could do with more of). One other problem was that for this race, one of our regular drivers (if doing one race can be considered regular) couldn’t make the race and had been replaced by Derek Holden, someone who had never driven at Rockingham before.
Friday was a quite relaxed day as we couldn’t afford to test and settled on installing the ATL fuel gauge, recording a promotional DVD to help with finding sponsorship and having the car scrutineered to reduce the workload on Saturday morning. It was a good chance to take a look at the opposition, which again added further to the pressure.
With extra time on our hands on Saturday morning we made the mistake of making some tweaks to the wheel alignment, which actually took us a step backwards. This coupled with one of the drivers having to learn the track whilst qualifying lead to a last place (21st) grid position.
There was plenty of time between qualifying and the race to remedy the wheel alignment ‘improvements’ so luckily the race was a bit of a different story. Sarah Franklin started the race and improved her times with every lap and brought the car into the pit-stop third in class. The team performed fantastically during the pit stop and the car returned to the track with Derek at the wheel and began hunting down the second placed Honda S2000. It wasn’t long before we had moved up to second place. The race continued to improve for us as the early pace of the Civic had resulted in very high tyre wear. We were gaining nearly 2 seconds a lap, but unfortunately ran out of time so finished the race 11 seconds behind the Honda. However, finishing second in class and 12th overall is still a very good result!
Sunday’s race wasn’t quite so spectacular. We started 12th on the grid (grid position being Saturday’s race result) and finished 10th. It was a good solid race, but although our fastest lap was an improvement on Saturday, we couldn’t find consistency. We also made a mistake in the pit lane and received a stop-go penalty. Luckily, our competitors had reliability issues so we managed another second place. So what we lost in the pit stop we made up for in vehicle preparation. The end result was another second in class!
We’re now joint 1st in class! Not bad for a bunch of kids! Children can build and maintain racing cars which can compete successfully in real motorsport. |
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15th April 2009
The next round of the Britcar Championship has been moved to Rockingham due to the ongoing construction work at Donington. With a good result behind us we decided to spend a day at Snetterton to see if we could get a bit more speed out of the car. The weather threatened rain in the morning, but it turned out to be perfect. This allowed us to play around with damper settings and tyre pressures, the end result being a lap time of 1:25 with the data logger showing that combining the best sector times from each lap would have resulted in 1:24. Our hope now is that we are equally as fast around Rockingham as it would be great to be first in class and in the top 10 overall. We need to be running in the top 5 overall by the end of the season in order to get a mention in Autosport Magazine, but this is definitely achievable. |
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28th March 2009
As is usual for Lunar Racing, we are on a very tight budget and, until the Thusrday before the race, it was still uncertain whether we would raise the entry fee or not! Fortunately, a business club that Franklin was involved with (BNI Kettering) came up trumps with some urgently needed cash. With five cars in our class and the car having had only one test since it was built (and no wet running whatsoever), it seemed like a victory just to be at the Northamptonshire circuit at all!
The weather at Silverstone was, as usual, unpredictable. With rain showers forecast for both qualifying and the race, it looked like it was going to be a real test of the students and drivers skills. The students spent Friday getting the car ready and practicing the pit stop re-fuelling (the churn being almost as big as the student Marc Buckingham!) and changing tyres.
Qualifying was wet and with this being our first run on wets, we decided to simply go out and put in the necessary laps to qualify without worrying too much about position. After all, a lot can happen in a 90 minute race and no one wanted to risk damaging the car. Hill went out and completed her necessary laps. Others were not quite so cautious and, after the handover to Franklin, she came out to spend two laps behind the safety car and then every other lap of qualifying with yellow flags somewhere on the circuit. Predictably, therefore, we qualified 5th in class and 20th overall with the car in one piece, which is more than can be said for some of the other runners!
With the race start looming, the weather brightened and the start looked like it was going to be dry. The slicks were put on and Franklin was nominated to start the 90 minute race.
With a first lap incident and several laps under the safety car as a result, the beginning of the race was eventful! On the re-start, Franklin managed to take the 888 Solutions Honda Accord of Byford & Fagg at copse corner to move the team to 4th. Then the heavens opened for not just rain but sleet and hail too! With a dry set up and slicks, each lap became increasingly testing. Initially one part of the circuit was dry whilst others were very wet and slippery. Franklin stuck with it until the pit stop when she handed over to Hill. During the 90 second stop, we managed to make a few adjustments to make the car easier to handle in the tricky conditions. Hill kept a steady pace and after the rest of the field had pitted, we had made another position! Thereafter, we remained 2nd in class to the end of the race.
We left Silverstone with 2nd in class and 12th overall – meaning we are currently 2nd in the Production Class 3 Championship!
Silverstone images courtesy of Marc Waller |
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14th March 2009
The first race on the 28th March, we wanted to have as much time as possible to get on top of the car. With this in mind, both car and drivers were re-united at Bedford Autodrome only two days after the Kemble test.
The car ran solidly for 4 hours, only stopping for driver changes. Driver feedback was very, very positive. The over-winter suspension upgrades made with technical partners Eibach and GAZ have made a huge difference and the car is very predictable and is getting more out of the tyres. The new engine pulls well and should be a very good advert for the skills of Lunar Race Engineering. There's another engine upgrade in the pipeline so there's still more to come! The only problem with the car was rear brake fade so we'll look at improved brake cooling. |
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12th March 2009
The 2009 Britcar Championship started on the 12th March with the official launch of the season and powerlogger test day at Kemble Airfield in Gloucestershire. This is the scene of straightline testing for a number of F1 teams from McLaren to Renault and Red Bull. The day consisted of runs up and down a straight track to gather aerodynamic and rolling resistance data for the 2009 entrants, (the data gathered will then be used to determine the power to weight of each car so that it can be placed into the correct class).
The LR1a had only been run in the workshop (and in fact had only just been completed the previous evening) so this was also a shakedown of the car. The upgraded engine ran without fault and apart from a slight pull to the left, the car ran without fault. Once again, a car built by students has run straight out of the box!
The day was also a chance for two of the student team to meet the 2009 drivers, Sarah Franklin and Gail Hill. Both drivers were very impressed with the build quality of the car and are looking forward to testing at Bedford Autodrome on Saturday (14th March). |
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