Well it’s been a while since our last update. We have ventured to the track a few times over the past weeks not much has happened racing wise.

The 53a machine has been performing really well all things considered, normally its fastest lap is within .5 of a second to that of the fastest lap time for any given race. We have changed the diff gears to increase the revs a little meaning out of the turns at a bit over 5000 and hitting 7800 at the end of the straight. With a few more revs the engine is sitting almost perfect in its power range and cracked its first sub 19 second lap with an 18.8sec lap. Its now just down to the driver to be more consistent.

We attended a simple club night at Waikaraka on the 31st March with about 6 Superstocks attending. The first race saw us out after the modifieds. Now normally for the first race of the night I have the engine started and warming up as the previous race heads out. But on this night with only 3 modifieds they were out on the track and back in the pits within a flash and my cold engine was sitting at idle pushing 100PSI oil pressure we headed out onto the track. Our formation lap I used 2nd gear to hopefully speed up the heating process but it was little help. Starting from grid 2, the flag dropped, the revs went up and the needle on the oil pressure gauge went right around. I’m just guessing somewhere over or around 120PSI, so I quickly pulled out to the wall and let everyone past, put the car in top gear and drove around for about 5 laps waiting for the oil to heat up and the pressure to drop. I then looked in my mirror to see Bryce (73a) closing in, deciding I’d try to not let my brother lap me I dropped the hammer for the last couple of laps and kept ahead of him for the last few laps.

The 73a car had fuel problems before the second race and failed to start, the second race for 53a was pretty uneventful.

The final race for the night saw 73a and 78a having a good race, unfortunately I had changed the rear suspension on 53a to try and find a better way through the ruts in the turns. It was terrible, I was hitting the ruts so hard the car was leaving the ground by so much, the hats that hold the coil springs onto the shock absorbers had come dislodged.

The gearbox is getting worse but with only a couple of meetings to go we will have to just keep going and then in the off season swap from HQ to probably ZF. While the night of racing wasn't spectacular you should have been at the workshop watching the cars being loaded. Put it this way, I remember saying that first gear was to fast and sometimes the chassis bottoms out while going up the trailer, so we should winch it up instead. I'll let you imagine what happened, but needless to say that some of the car got in the trailer and its a long way to fall to the ground. Best of all I wasn't driving at the time :)

Catch ya.....MadPhil