Where to begin! The last 3 months have been pretty crazy so I'll try and summarise what I've been upto in this post. I will be making an effort to post more regularly from now on!
Well we managed to get the car ready for Silverstone. The brakes turned into a bit of a nightmare due to the supplied hoses being completely wrong, but we got there in the end. Silverstone made a fantastic circuit to test the car for the first time and I really enjoyed myself. Learned so much about the car and how all the bits I've done work so well together, turning it into something capable of keeping up with (and in some cases out-pacing) Elises and Civic Type-Rs! I did manage to spin at about 70mph into turn 1 (Copse) on my first lap, but I soon learned to be a little less enthusiastic! Plenty of pictures here and a video of a few laps here.
After managing not to hit anything and after nursing the car home with a failed alternator, I set about planning the next track day. I was pretty happy with the setup of the car; the chassis felt balanced and the tyres worked well. And the brakes... wow! With the knowledge that the setup was pretty good, I decided to focus once again on sorting the bodywork out. Cash flow delayed this quite a bit, and in the meantime I met up with a few other CRX owners over at Millway for a dyno session (see my post from last year's meet here). I was to say the least, chuffed to bits with my result of 142bhp at 8000rpm! We all had a get together afterwards for lunch too and it was another great meet all in all.
Soon after the dyno meet I dropped the car into TGM to have a few little bits of rust sorted out and to get the tailgate smoothed over. Unfortunately this turned into a mad panic to get it finished the day before I needed to use the car at another track day! I was at TGM from 8:30am until just gone 8pm with everyone there pitching in to get it finished. Top job lads!
And then... myself and about 20 other CRX owners met up at the tiny circuit of Llandow in Wales for a trackday. It's a great little circuit but suffers from a bit of a dodgy surface in places and bugger all run-off, meaning I wasn't able to push as hard as I would have liked. That said, it was still enormous fun and I really put the knowledge I gained from Silverstone to good use. I captured two lots of video, the first being a bit of a test run. The second was with another owners camera, but although the sound is a little iffy it displays my most consistent and mistake free laps of the day!
So with all of that going on in during the past 3 months, I'm taking a few moments to decide what to do next. I'll be at Silverstone on the 29th supporting Tom and Sara from TGM in their first joint race of the season, and then at Rockingham on the 30th displaying my car as part of the Trackdays.com show. I've pretty much decided on a couple of stiffer springs for the car before the next event (Brands Indy, July 12th), so I can run 13/11kg front/rear. The only complaint I had from Llandow was the rear end wasn't lively enough (!), so hopefully making it a little stiffer should move things along. Oh and I've started spraying up the inside of the car so it matches the outside. I'll post details once that's finished.
What else has happened, aside from car stuff? Um..... I'll get back to you on that :)