Pictures Courtesy of George Carter text by Graham Walden

I  don’t like Silverstone, there I’ve said it. Maybe its down to the fact that I’ve only raced on the national circuit, which isn’t the most exciting circuit in the world. There is no flow to it and the corners are cobbled together from the main circuit and seem forced and awkward. As a venue there are lots of facilities, but they always seem locked or closed, and with all the gates and fences there, the place just gives me the feeling  it belongs to someone else who really doesn’t want you there, but has to put up with you as it needs the money….  Its not the circuit staff they are all helpful its just the place its self. I don’t like it and it seems the place doesn’t like me either…..
The last time I raced there was in 2004 my last race in the Tasmin, part of the Team Pistonheads entry for the Birkett 6 hour relay race. That wasn’t the best of outing’s as my run lasted little over a minute, the taz dropping the head off a valve and smashing it through the combustion chamber whilst on the pit straight. The car doing its best impression of a steam engine before grinding to a steamy halt at copse. Coincidentally that was almost exactly the same place the engine on the Moore Racing BMW  blew up during the Britcar 24hour race last year. Guess who was working the pit wall for them at the time. Would our first visit in the Tuscan prove more successful and myself and Silverstone become friends, time would tell.

Things weren’t starting particularly well. The gearbox needed to come out before we could do anything. A quick check with Universal Transmissions in Kidderminster who look after our gearbox, revealed that the cautionary strip down on our other gearbox had shown up worn selector forks. These would need replacing before it could go back together. After a quick ring round and an eye watering four hundred pounds later the parts were on their way. With a busy week  at work a few hours were snatched to try and get the gearbox out, but without taking it out with the engine or some careful machining it wasn’t coming out on its own.

The next plan was to take the car down to Jamie and Trevor at Castle Race Engines, and between us we’d swap the box on Tuesday and that would leave a couple of days to get the car on a rolling road to map the engine before testing on Friday where we could finally get down to some suspension setup.

As usual things started going wrong on Tuesday. I arrived at CRE near Silverstone at about lunchtime. The guys had decided to get a few other things out of the way first leaving the rest of the week to concentrate just on the race car. Fine by me as I wasn’t really looking forward to wrestling with the gearbox again. So  the plan was now for me simply to leave the car with them and pick it up on Thursday night. I unloaded the car and then noticed the clutch fluid master cylinder was empty. Mmm  that was the first thing we checked after the last race, and it was still full. Fantastic that meant the bell housing needed to come off as the slave cylinder is part of the release bearing.

Still a quick call to John Eales had one ready for Jamie to pick up the following morning. Typically this needed machining to fit, and that combined with work needed to allow the box to come in and out without the engine conspired to keep the car away from the rolling road. Still the guys had time to start to get to grips with the car and start to formulate a plan for the way forward.

I trundled down on Thursday picked the car up and spent the night in the car park outside the circuit, as they don’t let you in before 7:30. Still a cosy night in the penthouse suite and I was up bright and early as all the other trucks in the car park started up and headed for the paddock bang on 7:30.

The most surreal moment of the day occurred here, I bumped into Rob Barf as he was setting up the caterham slalom day, and he enquired if the roof tent was lion proof. On the basis a lion could climb onto the bonnet and claw its way into the penthouse. Now I know I live near a safari park but I haven’t seen many lions in the paddock.

Soon the car was unloaded and sat in the Team Wright Racing Awning that we’re sharing this season. We weren’t on track until 10:50 so I busied myself finishing off a few things on the car. The track was cold and damp so tyre choice was an interesting one. There wasn’t any standing water, but the low temperatures would make getting heat into slicks difficult. The single seaters went out first, they all went out on wet tyres but still suffered a lot of stoppages. Soon enough it was our session and after a short delay I headed out onto the track. I’d gone out on slicks and everyone else was on wet tyres, Marc managed a spin and then the session was stopped as the Lovely looking black stealth  bounced its way along the pit wall. We were stopped for quite a while whilst they swept up the remains of the car before heading out for the last  15 minutes of the session.

On slicks you had to be very gentle with the car, although I was going quicker than many of the wet shod cars. Brooklands was very difficult and a number of times I thought I was going to go straight on, until finally I missed a gear turning in and a very slow graceful spin saw me beached in the gravel, requiring the aid of a land rover and bringing the session to an end. DOH…

The second session was much better the track had dried out and got a little warmer, though engine felt a little flat, and we were running too high a pressure in the slicks, leading to some very sideways moments through Copse, but for most of the session we were trading fastest laps with Marc.

In the Third Session we started to struggle and despite a quicker track we were running a couple of seconds off  the morning session, and the car was starting to run a little roughly. In the final session we only managed a single lap before bringing the car back to the paddock.

Most of that evening was spent with the engine in pieces checking that everything was working correctly, we found a suspect connector on the distributor and found that the throttle pot wasn’t reading correctly showing load site 7 at idle rather than zero ( the range is 0-15) that would explain the rich idle then. Looking like we may have found the problem we put everything back together and headed off for something  to eat at the Green man before retiring at about 11 o’clock.  Jamie and Trevor having headed home with the intention of returning early with a new  throttle pot.

Team Hockin were also having a few problems, checking the Griff after testing had shown a badly worn front wheel bearing, Much phoning around by everyone in the paddock had them off to Steve Howard to fetch a new one and that evening saw them fitting it.

Howard Bryan also had an interesting day with his Tasmin suddenly developing an appetite for starter motors, chomping its way through two of them. Our old Tasmin did that once as well, so fortunately we still had a spare in the van which was pressed into service.

The following morning the first job was to change the throttle pot, this proved slightly more complicated than expected as the colours on the old pot were different to the later ones. Still thankfully I drew an wiring diagram with all the colours and ecu pin outs on it when I wired up the car, and more amazingly even managed to find it in the collection of notes I’ve built up, a Tuscan race car with a bespoke engine fitment and ecu, not being the sort of thing you can nip down to Halfords and get a Haynes manual for.

With the new throttle pot connected, and calibrated, thing were looking ,much better. That was until we tried to start the engine, which refused to wake from its overnight slumber.  More checking and rechecking of electrical and fuel systems found no fault, but suddenly the engine sprang to life. Well  actually it was more of an arthritic limp, but now it was at least running.   Much laptop fiddling soon saw a nice idle that no longer  made your eyes water with the unburnt fuel coming out of the exhaust, but as soon as you hit the throttle  all sorts of pops and bangs filled the air.

It was looking very shaky for qualifying. The tvr’s were called to the Holding area and we hadn’t been scrutineered yet. I quickly ran down the pit lane to find a scrutineer as Pops, drove the car there. Fortunately they were very helpful and quickly checked the car over, and I was soon in the holding area with the others waiting to go out.  The plan was just to get the three laps in to qualify and see how things felt, and watch the gauges.

Pulling out onto the track the car struggled to rev cleanly at first and then started to pick up quite a bit, although there was a definite miss-fire. With the three laps safely completed, the temperatures and pressures were looking ok, so I stayed out for a few more laps and put a reasonable time in considering, still 4 seconds down on where we should have been though, and 3rd on the Class B grid, right in the middle of everything. In my efforts to maintain as much corner speed as possible however I did manage another slight indiscretion at Brooklands again.   I swear I just turned the car round to wave at the crowd.

Back in the paddock 2 very wet plugs showed the severity of the  miss-fire, so the time wasn’t bad at all for a v6 Tuscan.

Jamie and Trevor worked ceaselessly to try and map the engine around the problems, but the problem just wasn’t consistent. After every tweak we would all listen to the engine and it would sound , much better, I would then take it for a quick spin around the paddock and return with a long face. On idle the car was now perfect and purred like a kitten, but as soon as you hit the gas the engine died.

Finally in a last ditch effort to get the car to run saw Pops driving round the paddock with Jamie perched on the roll cage, lap top in hand trying to watch what the ecu was saying and adjust it at the same time as hanging on.

By this time I was quite despondent, this wasn’t the start to the season I’d been hoping for. But we couldn’t afford to not at least try and finish the race. This season there are no dropped rounds so every finish counts even if we came last in class there were still valuable points on offer.  After the last ditch attempt to get the car to run, Pops came back to the awning and jumped out, in the process dropping his mobile phone through the harness hole in the seat, where it lodged itself. I strapped myself in and vainly tried to fish it out, whilst the others disconnected the lap top and readied the car for the off. I then popped and banged my way to the holding area.  Being right in the middle of the grid, everyone behind us was warned that we might be a bit slow off the line, and may not make it at all!  The engine just didn’t want to rev and backfired terribly. Trying to get away on the green flag lap was very difficult and terribly slow, Still soon I was back on the grid and probably the most nervous I’ve ever been, the prospect of the engine going bang and then being hit from behind, or worse the thing blowing up as we went round Copse in a pack was very real.

At the five second board I gave it some gas, to a cloud of black smoke and plenty of backfiring, so much so that Kevan Gore behind me was convince the end of the engine was imminent. Still as the red lights went out I actually got the car moving without too much drama, and even somehow managed to get a bit of wheel spin as the torque came in. I was quickly swallowed up by the cars behind me and settled into a pattern of keeping out of the way and watching the mirrors, there was no hope of keeping up with anything, there was a brief window of about 1000 rpm somewhere between 3000 and 4000 rpm, and I tried to balance the car in that window, but it was proving impossible, the engine would pull quite well in that range but then start miss-firing madly with all the dash lights and the rev counter dancing around. As soon as I lifted in the corner the engine would die with a backfire so loud I was worried about blowing the exhaust apart or even lifting a head gasket, apparently it even made a few of the spectators jump every time I  came around. This made cornering very difficult, as I was still travelling reasonably  quickly making almost 100 mph on the national straight, but couldn’t balance the car in the corners with no response from the engine. Spinning or going off now would have been the ultimate humiliation, but could have happened so easily. Still at least I was getting a good view of the other cars every time they came around to lap me.

At about the mid point of the race I pitted, to let the car cool down a bit and see if the team thought it was safe to continue. With the points we would loose if we didn’t finish we made the decision to go back out, If the engine did blow they would find a way to build another one, so I struggled back out onto the track.  It had been a very sad sight in the pit lane, two blue Tuscans parked line astern, Andy Holden had to retire his car with a blown head gasket.

I had by now given up the fruitless task of trying to keep the engine on song and simply put the car in 5th  and just about kept my foot in for the entire lap.  I did have a bit of a moment when Kevan Gore passed me on going into Copse. He braked on his normal line after passing me, and trying to carry as much speed as possible I entered the corner without braking and very nearly hit the back of him.  At about this time Howard Bryan retired in his Tasmin after an epic battle with Iain Jones in the Chimaera. He was suffering what he thought was a clutch problem which turned out to be a broken bellhousing and the engine and gearbox trying to part company.

Just to spice things up a little, after quietly staying under the seat for most of the race, Pop’s phone made a bit for freedom as I entered Maggots and Becketts, and shot under the pedals.  Driving along the straight I fished it out  and whilst wondering what exactly to do with it  Steve Hall Shot past me going into Brooklands, closely Followed by Tim Hood and Darren Dowling in the Sagaris and the Tuscan Fighting tooth and nail for the overall win, all of them disappearing in a cloud of tyre smoke as we entered the corner four abreast. Everyone made it safely round and I finished the last few laps with a phone in one hand, there being nowhere to put it, that wouldn’t risk it getting under the pedals.

After what seemed like an eternity the race finally ended and I snuck back into the paddock and quickly loaded the car in the trailer. The overall race was won by Tim Hood in the Sagaris and Marc took his second win in Class B and is the overall series leader, although he too was disappointed not to have a good battle with us.

Our whole team was quite dejected by the problems and all the effort and time put in, but if anything were all even more determined to solve the problems and get the car back fighting for class wins and worrying the AJP cars.  With that in mind The car went straight back to Castle race engines rather than back home, and they’ve spent the last week fettling things. They’ve found a couple of problems with the distributor and the Ecu, which hopefully there is a solution for, although we really need to replace the Ecu. The car is now running much better so hopefully we’ll be back in the hunt at Castle Coombe on the Bank Holiday Monday, although it’s a circuit I haven’t driven at and once again we’re not testing  due to time and budget constraints, although we hope to at least get the car at an airfield for a shake down.

So as Steve McQueen could have said “Racing is life, everything else is just fixing the car and trying to find the money”

Click for full gallery of images courtesy of George Carter