Post #140
So we had the car out at Snetterton on Friday to shakedown all the work over the winter. Day started with us being pulled in on the sighting lap saying that we are leaking fuel. With the car back in the pits we couldn't see any leak and thought that perhaps the marshals made a mistake and just spotted some water from the sills dropping down. With that I headed back out on track and made it round to Hamilton corner (fast-ish left hander) when the car spun straight round and I narrowly avoided hitting the tyres on the apex of the corner. After giving the marshals a hand turning the car round before being towed back to the pits, they let me know that the fuel was seen leaking from the the rear drivers side. We had had problems before with fuel leaking from the fuel filter so that was our initial thought.
Replicating the leak was tricky as it only occurred during left hand corners so we took the car to an empty part of the paddock and drove round in circles to see it for ourselves. It wasn't just a leak, fuel was literally pouring out of the side of the car. Having changed the fuel filter as part of a service we looked at the connections to make sure the it was ok, unplugging them, reconnecting them and going back to the paddock to do the circle test again. After putting some tape around the connection we thought it could be and even that didn't stop the leak, we had to give that up as an idea. We then jacked the car up on the left hand side as high as possible to see if we can get it to leak while static. This definitely happened as suddenly fuel started pouring onto the floor and we could now see it was coming from down the side of the tank. As a guess we popped the cover off the fuel pump to find fuel everywhere. Clearly we had found the source.
Unfortunately the car was fairly full of fuel at that point and we didn't have a siphon to get it out and so we couldn't remove the pump itself. After asking a few other teams at the track we eventually found a garage that had a siphon spare and with a bit of gaffer tape and 2 metres of caravan piping, we had fuel coming out of the car. Eventually we got the pump out to find the rubber seal and slipped down allowing the pump to move around a bit and fuel to spill out of the top. We re-seated the seal and refitted the pump and waited for the lunch break to finish so we could go out for a few laps. Finally, after losing the entire morning, we got the car out and completed more than 1 lap!
With the car running right we had to bed the brakes in and get a heat cycle through the shaved tyres. This basically involved me cruising round at about 70% speed and not pushing anything too much. After all the issues in the morning, it was nice to give the car a chance to run without hammering it round. We swapped to the other tyres and headed out to start pushing the car and boy did it respond. The front grip was simply staggering, nothing like how the car used to drive. More importantly it was very balanced near the limit and you could feel and control the LOOS through the corners which is particularly important at Snet. The new pads were also incredible, the power they had was so much fun and allowed us to really get late on the brakes in comparison to everyone else.
All in all, a challenging day. The car has a few small fluid leaks that we've got to monitor but is ready for the race series Media Day on the 5th March when we do some photo work and take journalists out for passenger laps.
Not many photos or videos this time as we were working on the car, but here's one from the beginning:
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Rallye Race Car
demondriverdan
Posted 29th Dec 2013 at 14:34
