Wow, what a rush. Let’s just say it’s been a little while now, with many of us commenting how it has felt like such a long time since we’ve been behind the cones, so to speak. It’s certainly been a while now with the date change for the August autoSOLO – almost 2 months have passed.
This has meant that we’ve all had a little time to prepare our cars and spend the weekends tinkering. The Blue Peril has been especially privy to this attention, and frankly it is almost a different car to learn in a lot of ways.
With its frame rails, that you can read our thoughts on here: https://bofiracing.co.uk/blog/mx5-frame-rails-the-full-story/ and it’s new Torsen 4.3 diff, alignment, tyres and tune – there is a few variables that have been changed.
The Peril performed largely flawlessly – the one thing letting it (and my times) down was the power steering giving up and becoming almost impossible to turn on 2 out of the 20 runs – our theory is that it needs a better quality fluid and / or a cooler – its a fairly common issue and is described as the fluid boiling over.
But AutoSOLO is always more about the drive and trying to be consistent with your times than anything else, its about growing your own skill level and once you’re comfortable trying to adjust your technique to get those extra seconds shaved off.
That’s certainly one of the things we love about the sport, everyone wants a tough competition, they want you to be trying your hardest and people will and do help you!
But I digress, we had a really great day with Leigh managing to pull 2nd in class with the Turbo Mk2 and I managed 5th in class in the Blue Peril (just missed out on 4th!). But the big takeaway for me anyway was 3 runs on the same track netting 40.8, 40.8 and 40.7 seconds – that’s some excellent consistency there and I’m really pleased with that.
The day itself was interesting in that for the first session (this is 3-4 tracks, there are generally 3 sessions before lunch) was basically washed out – little to no grip. So everyone’s times took a massive beating but it was a hell of a laugh, constantly trying to manage over steer and trying to judge your braking caused a few people to overshoot!
If you follow our facebook, you’ll have seen me post about last minute tuning on the Blue Peril – that’s very much proven to have done the trick. A combination of taking a gigantic log file and processing it through autotune as well as MegaLogViewer’s ve analyze system has provided me with a very stable fuel table which proved to work well.
The next AutoSOLO is coming up on the 23rd of October at Debden, we’re hoping to bring you some pictures of the event but due to rules and regulations we’re very limited in what we can do – but watch this space!
So, to finish this up – Leigh continues to bite at the heels of 1st place, I continue to get better with each outing (and i’m bound to plateau) and James has been introduced to the world of AutoSOLO… and there is another project car in the works… oh are you going to love this when you see it…
I wonder at what point the Peril is going to need boost to be consistently competitive with Leigh?
