Open sport report

A real mixture of results this weekend at Shakespeare county raceway. Some rubbish runs, some good ones and some that didn't make any sense at all. There were some things that went right (such as the weather!) and some that went wrong.....
On the right side, the new Schnitz PNC-3000 nitrous controller worked flawlessly and was a complete cinch to set up, the 70hp jets were in and nothing melted or broke and all plugs showed a good colour with no signs of running lean or overheating. Also i had none of the problems from the last round regarding selection of 5th gear, all changes happened as they should.
On the wrong side, setting up clutches and lock-up's ain't simple and i struggled to make it work. Running 60ft times that were worse than when i let the clutch out manually, and nowhere near the 1.2 or 1.3 i was hoping for. In our attempts to make it work I've burnt a few clutch steels and will probably have to replace them.

The weather then was very good, it rained some in the night but it was fine most of the daytime and racing ran almost uninterrupted.
I got 2 qualifying runs each day and 1 elimination run on Monday.

Qualifying round 1

Not a bad run but it didn't leave very hard and i got a bit of wheelspin. It didn't come up on the wheely bars at all. Went dead straight though and a new best ET and speed.
Stuart Crane in the opposite lane had problems and never left the line.


Qualifying Round 2

Ran this one on my own.
I'm convinced something went wrong with the timing gear in this round as the bike left better than the first run although it still span the wheel, it felt really fast and i was sure it was going to be an 8 second run. But the ticket says i red lighted, had a 2 second 60ft and a pretty poor 9.5 ET.... defo dodgy as even on the very first run ever i managed a 1.9 60ft and that was taking it well easy. So I'll never know what happened there.
I did reach a new best of 152mph though!


Qualifying round 3

Softened the tyre down to a squishy 6psi in the hope of stopping the wheelspin. But instead it still span and went to the left quite hard and i had to back off. It didn't feel like it span off the line but a few feet out.




Qualifying round 4

My last chance to qualify, i needed a 9.1 or better to make the 8 bike line up. I decided to add one more spring to the clutch to try and give it a bit more initial bite. It didn't feel much different though, the lever still felt very easy to pull too. On the run it didn't have the desired effect and it still left the line too softly and still span the wheel whilst heading to the left.

So once again i hadn't qualified. i was ninth and first alternate.
I spoke to Ivan Birch and his one of his crew (who's name has escaped me) regarding my clutch. Some of the steel plates were quite blue due to heat and he showed me how to check if they were warped and clean them up, as well as how to measure the air gap on the lockup and the pack height. he also lent me 4 shims to stiffen up the clutch further still... just in case i got to run the next day.

And as it happens, i bumped into Nick Holland and his dad Barry on the morning of eliminations and it turns out they couldn't run due to engine damage, so i was in!
I ran against Roland Chaplain. Despite a great reaction time and better launch i still had a little wheelspin and once again had to back off to get the bike away from the center line, at about half track he came storming past to run an 8.3 against my 9.2. A personal best and an improved 60ft time.
More base pressure seems to be the way to go .... i hope! I'm also hoping that the reason the bike keeps going left is the tyre pressure is too low. It only started doing that after i dropped it from the usual 8psi.

Over the next couple of days I'll finish this post with a complete set of pictures of all the bikes in the Competition bike class and the results of the meeting.