Brooklands
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Unfortunately no (decent) on track pictures. Nice to meet some old and new faces and being my first event there was at least one person's head in the engine bay whenever the bonnet came off.
I started off really easily and did a few steady laps in 3rd gear trying to keep the revs under 5K, but started to enjoy myself too much and was soon lapping at the same sort of pace as everyone else.
Have to say that I was totally amazed by the performance of the car. There are a lot of performance figures banded around about this kind of car, but it is not until you actually experience what 420bhp/ton feels like and how quickly a 390Kg car decelerates and changes direction accompanied by a spine tingling sound-track that you really appreciate it, come back to let it sink in and then go out and have some more.
Even more impressive was the fact that the car worked faultlessly all day, didn't overheat or suffer from oil surge and the handling was sublime. The balance was lovely, yet very easy to catch a slide if you trail braked or booted it. By the end of the day I was steering it on the throttle out of the bends. Perhaps the most mental bit about the car is the way it brakes. I have never been in anything that slows down as violently. A very good friend, who has owned some superb cars (Porsche 996, Ferrari F355) was convinced that we were going off more than once and literally couldn't believe how late we were braking. He then took me out for a few laps and I felt car-sick for about an hour afterwards. He was blown away by the performance per pound that this kind of car offers.
I offered Alistair Massaralla (750MC racer) a go and he said "no thanks", then "ah well if you don't mind". Al did a few sensible laps and came back in and proclaimed it to be "good" and that the R1 has a lot more grunt than the blade. This sentiment was echod by Martin Bell, who unfortunately was too lanky to drive himself round and therefore had to experience a passenger ride, which unfortunately saw me brake unfeasibly late into one chicane with far more speed than normal and thus lock up and punt a tyre. One cracked nosecone, still never mind it's fixable while there's no paint on it and bound to happen when the car is being used as intended.
I headed off home feeling absolutely exhilarated, still kicking myself for cracking the nosecone and thinking about the mad fools still lapping or driving home in their becs as the rain started to lash down.
Post-Brooklands
During the day I had been enabling the datalogging on the Digidash and had amassed quite a good amount of data. Here are some interesting plots:
Oil pressure vs. rpm
Useful plot that shows that the oil pressure was directly proportional to the rpms with the spread of values showing how varying temperature influences pressure. The good thing is that there are no instances where the pressure dropped out of this curve, which would indicate oil surge. So it seems that the All Bikes sidecar baffle is doing to job.
Also I now know to set the rpm related low oil pressure warning on the Digidash up to 25psi and 2500rpm. Anything less than 25psi at greater than 2500rpm is oil surge.
Speed
Shows that I was going faster throughout by the end of the day
Water Temp
Shows the water temp going up quickly but stabilising at around 60C, which is a bit low, but then it wasn't a very hot day and the track wasn't too arduous.
Oil Temp
Increasing more slowly than the water but still capped at around 65C.
Rpms
After getting lots of stick for using too many revs here's the proof that I didn't actually use as many as it felt like :-)
Last Session
Here's a closeup of the last session showing that I was locking the brakes into the last but one corner and carried more speed round which made me quicker at the end of the straight.
