Brooklands Preparation
Through the most excellent bike-engined-car list, Simon Neill once again excelled himself and organised another track day for listers. This one was booked on November 30th at Brooklands airfield. Just the kind of thing I need to shake-down the car and make sure that everything was working OK, so I booked!
The list of jobs to do before Brooklands seemed quite small and included essential things like fitting the brakes (big thank-you to Martin Bell for getting these from Hi-Spec in good time for me and even arranging (and paying for) a Saturday a.m. delivery). Also fitting a filler cap to stop the fuel sloshing out, some brake lights in the unfinished rear bodywork, suspension geometry setup, corner weighting, bolting the front wings and fitting some mirrors so I could hopefully not get in the way too much (at least at first :-). It seemed like a small list, but as ever it took longer than it should.
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Mirrors
I used Raceparts F1 mirrors with the adjustable bases for the wing mirrors and got them to supply one with a longer stem on it to act as a rear-view mirror. This is an ideal solution on the Striker with its angled dash with the aeroscreen over the top.
These are top quality, extremely light and not as expensive as some alternative options (particularly in carbon fibre). The carbon fibre models are available in two sizes. One is slightly smaller than their plastic versions of the F1 mirror and is intended for use on bikes. I had a pair of the larger ones.
I mounted the mirrors on the aeroscreen surround rather than the side panel because it is a more solid fixing. I was necessary to remove the side pillars and notch out some of the rubber aeroscreen surround, but surprisingly there was room in there for the nut on the back of the mount.
Front Wings
These had been perched on the car a few times to see what they looked like and it was now time to fit them. For some reason I found it really difficult to determine where to cut the slots for the wing stays. I ran a bit of string between the centres of the wheels and aligned the bottom edge of the wing with this. I kept getting one wing further forward than the other which was impossible as they were both the same length. It was certainly a job that required a bit of standing back and fitting by eye rather than tape measure. Cutting the slots was difficult because you can't offer the wings up where you need them to mark the slots until after you've cut the slots. Also my wing stays were not completely parallel so I couldn't use the outer end. After much head scratching the slots were cut.
I masked off the wheels with cling film and used a big socket and a couple of shims made from thin mdf to hold the wings where I wanted them, then applied two sausages of body filler to the wing stays, pushed the wings on and left it all to cure. Once cured I drilled through and bolted them on. What was all the fuss about then?
Suspension Geometry
I had originally set things up pointing in about the right direction, but left my brain in the house because I had assumed that 1 degree of toe meant 1 degree on each side and not total. I had also setup the camber with the car up on axle stands, which was useless.
I borrowed a set of alignment gauges and set about adjusting stuff. The front end was as tricky as ever to get both camber and toe settings where I wanted them as adjusting one causes the other to change. In the end I got the desired 20 minutes toe out with just under a degree of negative camber. Putting one turn on one track rod end will take the toe in by about a half a degree if toeing out proves to be too much of a handful on the road.
The rear wheels were adjusted by shimming out with washers between the hub carrier and upright. Eventually the correct combination was found to provide one degree of toe in and 0.3 degrees negative camber.
Corner Weights
With the car nearing completion, I took advantage of an offer to borrow a proper set of corner scales to see how much the car actually weighed now. These scales had also been used at an earlier bike-engined-car list trackday at Llandow so the results would be directly comparable.
Results:
FL:106.8
FR:76.0
RL:100.0
RR:109.8
Total:392.6Kg
This was with ALL fluids and about three litres of fuel, which makes the 'ready to drive' weight about 390Kg with the dry weight around 380Kg. There is theoretically still weight to come off, such as the rear brake calipers and disks and using 6" Barnby rims all-round. If I decided to turn it into a dedicated track only car with one seat, no lights then a dry weight of around 370Kg would be possible. However with paint on it will still be under 400Kg, which is nice.
With me in the weights leveled up quite nicely, but there was insufficient time to do any tweaking.
The car was now looking much more finished and now ready for a proper drive.