The day started pretty early leaving Sydney @ 5:30am. The afternoon prior after work i had a bit of an issue whilst i went to put the car on the trailer and found a leak (torrent) of fuel coming out of the hose running into the fuel filter. Not a good thing and very dangerous and it looks like the clamp i had reused down at Winton failed, very very glad it did it in my garage then on a hot car going around a race track.
Fixed this up and was paranoid about it failing again so every chance we had i or Andrew would check it.
Arriving at Wakefield and getting everything sorted the first session was a passenger session and i had bought down the passenger seat because Dave was coming up from Canberra to go for a ride but the first session he was running late and missed out.
Headed out nice and lightly and putted around the track just to see if everything was OK, then on the back straight gave it a boot full and started braking for the last turn when i noticed a large amount of smoke coming out from the rear of the car.
Quickly i pulled off into the pits and Andrew was waiting in pit lane, popped the bonnet and found that the turbo drain line that goes back into the sump had come loose and sprayed oil everywhere over the bottom of the car.
We jacked up the car in the pit garage and found that the gasket that goes in between the hose and the bottom of the turbo had moved when i put it back on and was the cause of the leak. We took the hose back off and sorted it out, trying to wipe off the oil as we were going that had gone everywhere right as far back as the rear diffuser.
All fixed up i soon headed out for the first timed session of the day and after everything that had happened up until this point i was just hoping nothing else went wrong. Gave it a bit of a blat around the track and it felt quiet slow almost like it was down on power. The miss fire seemed to have been fixed but there was a very slight miss on/off throttle that might be just some tweaking needed to fix, we decided to try out the std coil packs next session. A whistling noise started similar to what happened at Winton so i knew it meant the turbo gasket had already started to leak. To say i was annoyed would be an understatement, devastated was more like it.
We tightened up the studs on the dump which had come a little loose but nothing to bad considering they had just been replaced and also swapped out the splitfire coils and put the standard coils and loom back in.
I must say a big thankyou goes out to Wayne O Young for helping me out with a set of std coils and loom, he was only to happy to help out with this and it was very nice of him. I picked them up the weekend before and took them down with me just in case and it looks like i needed them.
We then adjusted the wing to lesson the rear down force and went out for our final timed session of the day. Car felt a lot quicker and the power felt a lot stronger, not sure if it was the coils or less drag from the wing but it did feel a little quicker. The heat was 30+deg so it might have just been the heat affecting the power as it was a stinker. Checking the data afterwards it seems like the speed down the straight was the same but i was staying on the power longer so it might not have been the drag from the wing.
So now we just need to sort out the following before Phillip Island
- gasket issues
- look at a knock coming from the suspension (metalic sound coming from the front)
- skim brake discs
- change brake pads
- change oil
- Alignment
A few shots that Andrew took from the day
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