I don’t really want to write this entry, but maybe it will be good for me to vent, you have been warned.

We went to Anglesey this weekend for the Ty Croes sprint rather hopeful of at least an average performance. We had found some missing boost (a weak spring in the CBV was limiting us to 8psi or so, after replacing with external BOV we had 14psi) which meant 50bhp extra to play with, a cage had arrived and been fitted and we now had four wheel sensors meaning traction control could be turned on.

Saturday morning didn’t start to well, the car stalled on Paul on the first gear change off the line. Logs indicated this may well be just when traction control should be coming in so we turned it off and tried again. I didn’t get a clear practice run due to catching the car in front but Paul got an OK second run, about equal on times to last year although top speed was clearly much higher.I had to skip the second runs due to the car running too hot when Paul returned it to the pits.

That was the complete highlight of the weekend. The rains came in and we were stood around wondering if we should take it out on slicks (we didn’t have any decent sized wets with us) with no TC to help. We decided to play with the TC settings to see if we could find out what was wrong, the short answer was probably nothing was and the stall is still rather a mystery. We did go out for the final run of the day and tippy-toed around without TC, turned out its wasn’t too bad for a scenic drive, although I don’t think either of us were trying at all having so wanted a dry day so we could learn some more about how to drive the slicks.

Sunday morning started dry … and it then rained before the first run. I was starting to think it was time to go home, but we stayed, turned on TC and went out. The car felt very docile and rather hard to drive, but safe. After an early lunch it looked like we might have a chance of dry run later. So we turned down the TC to get back some drivability, but Paul reported it was just the same. He got a re-run due to another Westfield going off, so we had to take the car back to the paddock to re-fuel for me which pushed me virtually to the end of the run. When I eventually got out the car was hopeless in comparison to the grip available on the drying track. I don’t recall ever been so ****** off as after this run.

This is when the weekend really fell apart, because I ran late in order we had little time to look for faults. I tried downloading the ECU data logs but it was taking forever so abandoned this and we went for the quickest possible fix we could think off, turn off the electronic shift cutter in case that was causing the issues. Paul went out for the last run but it was obvious it was no better, end of day.

That was it, a weekend of waiting for a dry run completely ruined by a stupid fault occurring just at the wrong time and being masked by the wet. The kicker of course is that after getting back home it took me all of 30 mins to locate the issue as a simple boost leak. We had initially lost boost on the run just prior to turning on TC but obviously we didn’t know it as messing with TC had initially hid the issue. Of course we were only messing with TC in the first place because of a mystery stall. I am struggling to belive the luck we have had this year. Faults on a new-ish package I can deal with, but this feels like a ******* conspiracy now.

That’s this year over for us, four rather unsatisfying outings, arguably where our relative performance has got worse at each one. Not sure what the future holds really, I have put too much time/energy/money into this car to really want to walk away from it, but I can’t continue having such a bad time with it for my own sanity. We still have last years car so that gives us some other options. Either way I am going to stop writing about this for a while, other things in life have to take priority for a bit.

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