With the season over for us its time to start testing again, first up was a run out at the new Blyton Park track. officially this was a trackday organized by Javelin Trackdays (my favourite track day company by the way..), but we wanted to test some changes to the car so just made a number of short two lap stints but on the very soft sprint/hillclimb tyres that we use for competition.
The morning session went pretty well, we found a problem in the way I was trying to control boost that meant the control logic was never going to be able to react quickly enough, but after some minor re-configuration an alternative method was shown to be working well. After that we moved on to testing a another new throttle response control strategy, don’t want to say much about this (or the other methods we are using) yet, but it got rave reviews from the test driver so I think that’s a keeper as well.
The afternoon was less productive with the trackday crowd getting in the way a lot by not yielding position for overtakes. Can’t say I blame them, I used to be the same once I thought I knew the track well enough but it’s quite frustrating been stuck behind on a small track. Don’t think we will be going back to Blyton anytime soon, for a trackday anyway.
I made some other changes to the cooling system by adding a splitter to encourage better flow through the radiator, this worked pretty well, roughly running 10C cooler than it had before. What did not appear to improve much was flow through the intercooler. Think we have reached the limit of what I can get from this setup, so time for new ideas on further cooling to the inlet temperatures. The temps aren’t bad, but we can do better which will mean more bhp (and probably a little more weight).
From the Blyton data logs I think I may have found a weakness in the engine fueling that has been causing problems forever. Can’t say for sure just yet, but it’s now top of my list to checkout on another run. If we can nail that and make some more progress on inlet temps in the next run then think I will be happy to start a winter rebuild with some confidence about next year.
