I went outside to hook up the trailer but noticed the two rear tires on it were completely flat. Grabbed out the electric air pump and pumped both of them up then hooked up the car ready to head off. In the mean time Dave was cooking up bacon and eggs for breakfast and Martin was still crashed out on the couch after sleeping on it for the night, he soon woke up to the smell of cooking pig J
We headed off about 7:30am from the resort and drove the short distance to the race track, we came in through the tunnel that goes under the track to see the pit’s a mass of activity with all manner of cars being unloaded from trailers and in some cases full on transporter trucks - V8 Supercars style.
Found a spot we could unload and we organized a garage for the weekend - $250 later I thought we need to see if someone wants to share but could not find anyone. We bit the bullet and paid the cash, Martin and
Dave washed the car as some animal on Friday night pissed purple stuff all over the back of the car and the roof, was a pain to get off but with some washing and bug and tar remover it all came off. I headed off to sign in and then came back and unload all the stuff out of the car and when we went to take the car off the trailer we could not key for the car. We looked everywhere and pulled everything apart, even pulled up the drain underneath to see if it had fallen through, I had run out of time and the drivers briefing was called so had to head off and hopefully the guys could find the key.
Nice quick drivers briefing and groups were starting at A and I was D so was not the first one on the track.
Phillip island has a funny rule where you cannot start up “race” engines before 9am, think it is to do with the surrounding house but they were pretty strict about it and to get you car scruti you had to push it down and push it back up the hill to your garage, this was about 200mtrs so no small feet.
Came back and we still could not find the key, I ended up missing my first session because we could not find it and then just as I was about to call the NRMA, Martin stuck his hand in his pocket and found the key!!!! Needless to say we were all relieved and kindly let Martin know he was buying the beers that night, i really didn't care that it had happened as i was so glad we found the key.
It was pass 9am so we started the car and took it straight down to get scrutineering, we needed to change the brake fluid so once it was scrutineering we drove it back up to the garage put the car up onto 4 stands and pulled all the wheels off, changed the fluid with Martin on the brake pedal and Dave filling up the fluid we were done in no time. Adjusted the tire pressures to 23psi all round cold and pulled out the passenger seat to save some weight. We were now all ready to go.
The sessions were 15min in length and at about 10:30am my next session started so I headed on out. Took it easy the first few laps then started to put the foot down, started to get some intermittent miss on full throttle which was very frustrating.
Came in and we changed the plugs over to new NGK BKR7E gapped down to 0.63mm, went out and the warm up lap was fine. Started the second lap and got through to just coming out of Siberia and started to miss again. Kept going and just tried to not make it happen which resulted in just not using full throttle.
Came in and called Unigroup who suggested doing a couple of things to narrow down the problem, next session went out with 18psi boost and still had missing at what seemed like a little less but was hard to tell.
When we came in we tried adding 10% more fuel to the mix and went out and it was worse now with not being able to use full throttle at all.
Next session we dropped the fuel from it’s normal setting by 5% as the theory was the new fuel pump had bumped up the fuel pressure. Knock rose to 48 which was a worry.
Swapped to BKR6E’s gapped at 0.8mm went out with boost @18psi and it seemed better for about 1-2 laps the got progressively worse again.
That was the end of the day so we had to wait until Sunday to try running less boost.
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