Sorry about not updating for the last few meetings. I’ve been doing meetings with two cars which has been a lot to keep up with.
A 6.30am start, Ugh! But worth it to support a Testimonial meeting for Craig Fearnly by proxy through Cancer Research. I didn’t know Craig well, but he did strike me as an enthusiast in the best sense of the word. A disease which kills people so far before their time, often painfully, and always causes distress even in its mildest forms, is to be fought at every turn. so worth it.
Both cars were set more or less for the dry, so getting the cars out for practice and finding both sliding about at the back even with Ballistic Greens on was a Nasty start.
Round 1 Wasn’t as bad as I thought it was. The 2wd very squirrily at the rear, the 4wd was better in most places.
Then, from Round 2 to Round 4 I just started making a series of mistakes through not thinking through my options carefully enough. I replaced the rear springs on both cars with softer ones, which wasn’t a terrible idea. However on the 2wd, I needed to radically increase the ride height to allow the car to roll more. Instead, I just left it at 17mm, which wasn’t enough. What I did do was foolishly expect some kind of tyre Voodoo to rescue me. Silver Mezzos in the 3rd round, worn Proline CR3 Pyramids in the 4th. Silly.
With the B74, the answer was kind of staring me in the face, just take the rear roll bar off! But nope, I had to persist with preying to the random tyre gods. The Pyramid CR4s were a bit better, but not enough to make the difference I was after. And then I made the big cock up. Before round 4, I raised the ride height some more and swapped out the spring cups on the rear shocks to the +5 versions. To cut myself a little slack, this isn’t a problem on the 2wd. But on the B74, the extra droop allows the drive shaft to pop out of the diff out drive. If you want to run those settings, you have to lower the diff height relative to the drive shaft so that the out drive is a couple of millimeters closer to the drive shaft at full droop extension. (I guess you could also put in internal damper spacers if you had the time and could afford to limit the droop).
Round 4 was an omni-shambols, with the drive shaft popping out of the out drive every right hand corner. Despite manful attemps by Milo and others to keep popping it back in. It soon became clear it was a dead loss. Once back in the paddock, I was helpfully advised where I had gone wrong, and in hindsight, it’s an extremely good lesson to learn. Once corrected, almost annoyingly, the sun came out and rendered all that moot. I swapped the center diff out for the slipper, and it turned into an absolute apex animal. Accelerating, turning and braking like it wanted to chew a small child’s face off unless you drove it faster. Very promising for the future.
Even with the hotch potch of settings and tyres I ended up with on the B6.4d, as usual in the dry, it put up with them and set about giving a half decent consolation result.
Anyhow, you live and learn. Didn’t do too badly in the Balloon fun races…
Didn’t win anything in the raffle. But I learned a lot, thoroughly enjoyed the Caravan race, and went home happy!