“Was it oversteer, or was it like Juan Manuel Fangio OVERSTEER? –Austin Brauser

At the end of part 1, Charlie was just leaving the pits at the start of session two. We had him run another install lap to make sure everything in the gearbox was fixed. About 150 seconds later he rolled into the pit box and verified that the gearing was ok, so we sent him out for his first flying laps. It was extremely exciting the first time we saw him fly by us on the pit wall and I could tell that Adam was having a blast with the radio system. After 5 laps Charlie returned to the pits; we checked tire pressures and temperatures, and then noticed the smell of burning plastic. We looked around and located the source as one of our Formula One spec heat stickers. The fiberglass was fine, but despite not showing its maximum temperature reading the sticker was cooked. All things considered, not such a bad loss. Charlie then mentioned that he was experiencing a lot of oversteer. I think some of this can be attributed to the almost freezing temperatures and newly paved track, but nonetheless we began our attempts to dial it out. After a few minor suspension adjustments, Charlie headed back out on track and got some valuable seat time throughout the rest of the session.

Once Charlie was out of the car and had some time to collect his thoughts we had a debrief in which he explained the behavior of the car in each section of track. We then prioritized the issues and set about with a development plan.  The car still had a large amount of oversteer so we replaced the rear anti-roll bar with a softer one. We also reduced tire pressures by about 2 psi after gaining some valuable new setup information from some of the other teams in the paddock.

 I think at around this time we may have run off to the Silverstone café and grabbed our lunch. I will say that aside from Lime Rock’s Chilidog, Silverstone has some of the best race track food that I have ever had. This time I went with the chicken stew. When we headed back to the garage Louise Goodman from ITV was grabbing a spot of tea, so Adam and I made sure to say hello and introduce ourselves and the team and hopefully get on her good side. Unfortinately we had to cut the conversation a bit short to get Charlie out for session 3, but she was very understanding.

“We’ve got ourselves a bloody driver!” –Adam Painter

Session 3 and session 4 were much less eventful than the morning sessions, but they were just as productive. According to Charlie the changes we made to the roll bar improved the handling issues quite a bit, we tried softening up the rear a bit more and that helped, but also introduced some unwanted body roll on portions of the track. We stiffened the rear back up a bit, but countered that by stiffening the front a bit too. These changes seemed to get us back on track and we got in as many laps as possible in the final 2 sessions, the only small issue being the camera coming out of its mount. Since I mounted the camera upside down (It’s a cylinder - cylinders are quite symmetrical!) and since Silverstone won’t let us publish any onboard video anyways it actually wasn’t that much of a problem.

At one point in the afternoon session Charlie was running nose to tail with one of the new, more powerful Ecoboost cars for 3 or 4 laps, as well as outpacing some of the other Duratec Formula Fords. Ultimately numbers are what matter in racing, and we can say that between tweaking the car’s setup, Charlie knocking off his rust (Some of which may have been offset by his lunch), and slightly improving track conditions average laptimes between sessions 2 and 4 were reduced by 20%. We’ve still got a ways to go in terms of improving the car for Charlie. I have quite a good idea of what we need to do, but for now the next big challenge for us is to find a more permanent garage so that I can make all of these changes, and to hook up the data system so that it can provide us with some valuable data for the future. We’ve got a lot to do in the next month before round 1, but based on what we have accomplished in the past 4 weeks I am more than confident in our abilities to bring a competitive car to Oulton Park on Easter Weekend.

“Yesterday we were students. Today we become privateers!” –Adam Painter, with a cheeky grin and giddiness usually reserved for children on Christmas morning.

I’ve been to Silverstone several times over the last year and a half, but never with a full night’s sleep. Our test in Friday made sure to kept that record intact. After the drive to Silverstone right after work on Thursday, we rolled the car into Silverstone. Garage 0- right next to race control,  at 9:30pm. Penny Mattocks from the MSA Dunlop Formula Ford Championship was kind enough to wait for us and give us a quick tour of the paddock before we began working. Despite all of the progress that we made in Oxford the previous weekend there was still a lot of final preparation to be done. I first refilled the coolant before adjusting Charlie’s seatbelts, and making our area look neat and professional. We left the circuit to meet Adam at his house in Oxford, and got there at about 12:15. We went over our test plan one last time, made a last minute shopping list and got to bed at around 2am.

We were all up and on the road before 6am.  We hit some heavy fog on the way, and when we got back to the track it wasn’t much better. As Charlie mentioned in his post, the start of on-track activity was delayed from 9am to 11am so that gave us a bit more time to work on the car in the morning. We finally got our dash from Jamun Racing – a big thanks to James Mundy for taking the time to find the dash, mount, and connecting wire in his massive trailer. After a bit of searching I found the mating connecter on the wiring loom and the dash started to make some pretty colors. Once it was working James showed us how to reprogram it. We stuck it in the steering wheel for the day; it functioned, but we do need to go through before our next outing and fix a few of the settings. We also need to get the cord to connect it to my laptop!  Another thing we did was to shield a portion of the sidepod that was very close to the exhaust with some reflective tape, and fitted some temperature stickers in hopes of gaining a better grasp of how close the fiberglass was to its combustion point. When 11 am rolled around and the fog had finally lifted, we had Charlie ready for the first session. He pulled away for an install lap and we watched him roll down pit lane, holding our breaths and hoping nothing would fall off the car. 

“The gear ratios are all wrong.” –Charles Anti

A few minutes later Charlie rolled into the pits with everything still attached and nothing on fire, which was good, but he reported that he was hitting the rev limiter about halfway down the Hangar Straight – that was bad. Considering Charlie had no experience with this gearbox, we sent him out for another lap to verify the problem and while he was out we began to make a plan. Between myself, Jake and Adam we had taken apart a grand total of 0 Hewland gearboxes. Our first session was pretty much done at this point but before Charlie got back around I had the manual up on my computer and I had also kidnapped two members of the Myerscough College team who were only in our garage for a cup of tea (we were sharing our garage space with Formula Ford hospitality). Fortunately they were extremely friendly and even more fortunately one of them had experience with Formula Ford gearboxes.

Once I figured out that we needed some oversized sockets that we didn’t have yet I went on a quest for them. I had Charlie go on his own quest to find out what gear ratios other teams were using, and I sent Adam to Trident Racing Supplies for some gearbox oil. I got what I needed from Enigma Motorsports, and Charlie obtained some correct ratios from Jamun Racing. A great thing about Formula Ford is that despite the competition, the Formula Ford paddock has some very nice people in it and I’m looking forward to some new friendships! Getting back to the gearbox, Jake found all of the specified ratios in our supply box and I had the gearbox taken completely apart.  By this time Adam was just getting back and Charlie was off doing his race car driver stuff – probably sitting in a comfy couch surrounded by beautiful women while signing autographs or something like that (Note from Charlie: “yea, close enough…”).

Fundamentally the gearbox is actually quite simple, but it was still a bit intimidating having it apart for the first time – even with our friends from Myerscough helping out. The most important thing is to make sure that all of the spacers and bearings stay in the correct spot. Off the top of my head without looking I’m going to say the order is bearing, dog, gear, gear, dog, spacer, dog, gear, gear, dog, bearing… try saying that five times fast (and don’t quote me on that order)! We got everything put back together and by the time Charlie got back the car was just about ready to go. We did it, with lots of help albeit, but we did it. Not only did we swap the ratios for the first time but it was the first real challenge that we faced and we kept our cool, formulated a plan, and executed said plan without missing the second session. We refilled the gearbox oil and ran through the gears, first spinning the wheels by hand, and then having Charlie go through them with the car on stands. All signals were good so we sent Charlie out for session 2. 

As Charlie mentioned, we have a lot to talk about from Friday, so in the interest of brevity I’ll stop here, but look out for part 2 in the coming days!

Hey everyone! There’s a lot to talk about after our test last week, but I know you don’t want to read a novel so I’ll try to make it brief.

We rolled into an extremely foggy SIlverstone at 7:15am, and began working on a few final preparations to get the car ready. In the drivers’ meeting, we learned that the first session, originally scheduled for 9:00, would be postponed until 11 due to the fog. This turned out to be great news for us, since we ended up needing those extra 2 hours to finish working on the car. 

At 11, with the fog finally lifted and the car ready to go, we rolled out of the garage, fired it up, and I promptly stalled it in front of everyone in the pitlane. I fired it up again, gave it more gas and did a pretty fantastic burnout to avoid stalling yet again.

Our plan was to do a single out/in installation lap, and for the first session that’s as far as we got. The car came with the wrong gears, and I was running out of revs halfway down the straights. It was very confusing for me, since I’m used to driving cars with fixed ratios, and I kept thinking I couldn’t find 3rd and 4th gears. I did another lap to make sure it wasn’t me being stupid, and pulled in to change ratios.

This handed our crew their first real challenge of the season, figure out how to pull apart the gearbox, swap in the right ratios, and put it back together before the beginning of the next session. I’m really dense when it comes to mechanics, so after hanging around for a bit I left meet the tailor who was fitting drivers for custom suits, and also attend a mental performance seminar the series was holding. It all took about 30 minutes, and I got back to the garage 10 minutes before the beginning of the next session. As I turned into the garage, I fully expected to see the car still in pieces. Austin, Adam, and Jake did an awesome job to get the car back together, with the right gears in the right places, in time for the next session. We also owe a big thanks to Jamun racing for helping us pick gears, and Myerscough College for showing us how to take apart and replace the gearbox.

After that initial drama, things went smoothly the rest of the day. My main job was to knock off 4 years of rust, get comfortable driving the car quickly and learn how to use the transmission. I’ve never driven an H-pattern racecar before. After the second session the corners began to flow much better, and I was able to carry momentum and catch slides. It was so cold that even with a 150 horsepower we were still getting power oversteer! Following one of the new EcoBoost cars, I witnessed it lay down an impressive strip of rubber exiting Vale. We tried changing roll bar settings to dial out the oversteer, and we went in the right direction but still had some more to go.

At the end of the day we were on pace with the other Duratec cars there, and 6 seconds off the lap record. But with a rubberless track, very cold conditions, old tires, a rusty driver driving a new car, and a very new team, I think we can be proud of what we did and it’s a very promising start.

We took some great on-board video, but for some reason Silverstone hates free publicity and won’t let us publish it on the internet. I’m going to try to talk to them about it but I get a feeling they won’t be very interested in what I have to say.

I suppose it only makes sense that my European racing debut comes at the home of British motorsport, and the birthplace of Formula 1. In case you haven’t heard, our first test is this Friday, on the Silverstone Grand Prix circuit. Not the little National circuit, the full 3.6-mile track.  The one the Formula 1 cars race on. “Copse,” “Stowe,” “Maggots-Becketts-Chapel,” are all terms  we’ll be using to refer to the track that I’ll be racing on I’ve always preferred the European system of naming corners than just giving them numbers. Not only does it give each track its own personality, but in one word you can identify both the particular corner and track that you’re referring to. Every (non-oval) race track in the world has a turn 5, but only Spa-Francorchamps has La Source. Only Monza has the Lesmos.

But on to Silverstone. There are several challenges we’ll be facing this weekend. The most significant is that I’ll be driving a car I’ve never driven, on a circuit I’ve only seen on TV and in F1 2011, with a gearbox that I’ve never used on a race track (it has a proper H-pattern), without having driven competitively in 3 years. With that in mind, our morning program is very simple. I’ll leave the pits and come straight back in. Austin and Adam will take a look at the car to make sure it’s not leaking and nothing has fallen off. After that I’ll do 5 laps and then another quick check, and then I’ll just go out and do laps until the session ends or we run out of fuel. If I’m starting to feel comfortable before the end of the session, we may start making some simple changes to start getting a feel for their effects. But it won’t do much good if I’m missing apexes and grinding gears.

Once all the rust is knocked off and I put up some consistent times, we can start making set-up changes. The previous driver liked to run with a very stiff front, so we may work on softening it up a bit. I’m not exactly sure what we can change, but we’re being garaged right next to Jamun Racing, the team who have won the championship every year since around 2006. So maybe our high-budget operation won’t intimidate them too much and they can help us out a bit.

We’ve got an on-board camera, so we’ll definitely capture as much video as we can and, if they let us, throw it up on YouTube and here for everyone to see!

Hey Folks! Austin reporting again- we took delivery of our car this past Friday and spent the weekend preparing it for our first test this upcoming Friday. Overall I think we are in pretty decent shape; there are a few small things we need to work on but the car is pretty much ready to go. I’ll take you through the trials and tribulations we went through this weekend.

Charlie and I took delivery of the car and trailer at around 9am on Friday morning. The previous owners dropped it off at my workplace and gave us a brief rundown of how it worked and what they were giving us. We had to cram everything (mostly parts for our ridiculously huge awning) that was in their van into the trailer before they set off. The car sat in my parking lot all day and I showed it off a bit to some coworkers at lunch. As this was happening Charlie was in Birmingham to pick up the rental car to tow the trailer to Oxford. He arrived back at my office just after 5; we hooked up the trailer and after topping up a few of the tyres with air from our trusty new pump and jiggling the wires so all the lights worked (damned English electrics!) we were off to the workshop. We met Adam at the workshop on Friday night, created a plan of attack for the next day, and we began preliminary disassembly. After checking the car for fluids we also fired up the engine for the first time to get that bug out of our systems!

We were up early on Saturday for a full day of car rebuilding action. We started off taking a quick inventory only to find out that we were missing the car’s dash. We’ll have it by Thursday, but this has caused a bit of an issue in installing the data system. After this initial bump in the road, things started to go much more smoothly. We bled the clutch system quite quickly before removing a steering sensor that is not ours. Adam and I then went through and rebuilt all of the corners, torquing all of the bolts to specification. At this point a few more helpers showed up and we removed the sidepods and floors. When we took the floors off we found quite a bit of dirt and debris from some past off course excursions. I also used this opportunity to inspect the chassis for cracks. Once that was all cleaned out we flushed the coolant system and refilled it before adjusting the throttle cable and running through the gears.

Moving forward we installed the radio, made a lower seat (had some issues with the upper part but modified the insert that came with the car to fit Charlie, and adjusted the steering wheel to Charlie’s liking before replacing the cockpit shroud, which we have affectionately started referring to as “the fairing.” We discovered that we do in fact have more boxes of tent than race car. Our tent is massive- 6 x 9 meters, and with it our paddock space is definitely going to be in-tents. If you’d like to rent it out for parties please let us know! We rounded out the evening by taking corner weights and posing for a group picture that is quite nice if I say so myself.

On Sunday we packed up, but before loading the car on the trailer, we re-purged the coolant system due to potential freezing weather conditions in our area this week. In doing so we played a fun game with water pressure and I ended up getting drenched.  It was quite humorous, so much so that we filmed a re-enactment, but we didn’t quite capture the magic of the original.

Overall it was a great weekend in terms of knowledge gained and prep work done. Come Thursday when we set up shop at Silverstone we should be in a good position to get some valuable testing in.

Things are kicking off and I’ve got a busy week ahead! We’re taking delivery of our car later this week, and sometime before Friday I need to sort out insurance and buy another car that can tow our trailer. I also need to finalize my registration for the championship! As I mentioned last week, we’re taking the car down to Oxford Brookes where Austin and our newest recruit, Adam Painter, will do their engineering magic to make the car super fast and reliable for our next test. Since he knows what we need to do better than I do, I asked Austin to write a bit about what we’ll be doing to get the car ready for Silverstone on March 2:

With car delivery slated to happen over the next few days, and our first test only 10 days away, we have quite a bit of work to do. We need to take a car that Charlie’s never driven, and that I’ve never even seen and ensure it is ready for the twists and turns of Silverstone on March 2nd. Once we have the car in our possession we will perform an inventory of the parts we have available and figure out what equipment we still need to purchase, to ensure we are adequately equipped to handle a variety of situations that may happen at the track. We bought some zip ties, duct tape, and a hammer yesterday so that should get us most of the way, but we should probably have a few more things, just in case.

Once inventory is complete, we will strip down and rebuild of the car to ensure all of the nuts, bolts, and fittings are properly torqued and secured. On a side note, now is a good time to tell you that despite the fact that blue Loctite tastes like candy (Note from the editor: ಠ_ಠ ), you probably shouldn’t eat too much of it. Another benefit of this strip down will be to help us familiarize ourselves with the car itself; even if we were buying the car brand new and assembled from the factory, I would do the exact same thing. Once I am satisfied that the car isn’t going to fall apart we’ll put on a suitable set of springs and a usable gear ratio based on the data we can scrounge from past events. We’ll then fill it up with fluids (engine oil, gearbox oil, coolant, brake fluid, and petrol).

After a systems check we’ll fire the engine up and verify the functionality of the sensors and data logging unit; At this point the car will be drivable but there are still a few more things to do in order to prepare the car for Charlie. We’ll mold a seat using two part foam and we’ll adjust the pedals to his liking. When this is finished I may definitely will push the car around the parking lot and make race car noises before setting corner weights and packing the car in the trailer for the first test. We’re currently working on a test plan; once we determine what exactly that is I will be sure to give you another update very soon.

Cheers!

Hello everyone!

Well I mentioned when I started this blog that I’m terrible with keeping diaries/journals/etc. I’m terribly sorry I haven’t updated in more than 2 months. Part of it is because nothing interesting happened, and part of it was because big things were happening and I didn’t want to talk about them prematurely.

But, I’m totally stoked to announce that I have sold my racing car in the U.S. and on Monday I will be transferring funds in payment of a 2009 Duratec Formula Ford! Yes, we did it! With a month and a half before the first race of the season, and 2 weeks before the first official Formula Ford test day, we’ve gotten a hold of a very competitive car! Right now I’m swamped with registration and licensing forms and other bureaucratic nonsense to make our entry official. It’s really tough to keep track of all the things I need to do when I’m bouncing off the walls with excitement!

So the plan for the next month is this: We take delivery of the car early next week, and the weekend of the 21st-22^nd we’ll take it down to Austin’s Alma Mater Oxford Brookes. They have facilities where we can do set-down, look through the car to make sure all the bolts are tight, make sure the engine starts, and other diagnostic checks to make sure everything is in top shape. It will also give us a chance to mould the seat! For those who aren’t familiar, al modern formula cars and prototypes (and probably most sports cars), from F1 to IndyCars, all the way down to Formula Ford and Skip Barber, have seats that are molded to the driver’s back. This helps keep the driver from having to brace himself in the car through the corners, as well as insuring maximum comfort and increasing safety in a crash.

Another exciting thing is that the car we bought is a lot less than I expected. So, barring unforeseen costs (read: crashes), we’re able to do at least the first 3-4 races of the season! So now we have a chance to put up some results and hopefully gain some momentum, which could immensely help the sponsorship hunt.

So after a long, cold off season, things are starting to thaw! Next week I’ll get Austin to write up what he’s going to do with the car to prep it for the test, and we’ll start putting up some videos, pictures, and other other more exciting stuff!

First race is April 7-8, with the next race more than a month later. This gives us about 3.5 months to sell my old car, buy a new one and get at least two test days in. Wish us luck!!

Hey everyone! I came down with a pretty gnarly cold this weekend, and it’s been a while since a real update so I figured now was a good time.

As of now, there are two major tasks standing between where I am presently and getting onto the grid for the first round of the 2012 Formula Ford Championship. The first, as I mentioned in my last post, is selling my old race car. That’ll get us the money to get the Formula Ford and all the stuff we need to race it. 

The second, and much more difficult part, is finding a job. With nothing but doom and gloom in the news about how the world economy is going to kill us all, I knew that it wouldn’t be simple. Since I moved here I’ve sent out tons of applications and spent hours writing cover letters. So far it’s been good enough for a single phone interview, and a few recruiters saying they *might* have something that fits. It’s been tedious and frustrating, and last week I got an email from the one interview I got saying they went with someone else. 

It’s not really a big deal, just brush it off and send out more applications. But it did get me to start thinking; what if this doesn’t work? What if I get all the way to April, June, August with nothing to show for it? Is there some other way to get my career off the ground? Will I be condemned to the horrors of the real world for the rest of my life? I’m not really sure what I would do.

But then I started thinking about what I opened this post with. I’m SO close to getting there. All I need are these two things. Job hunting is frustrating because there are so many variables I have zero control over, but it’s something I would need to do anyways. So it’s not worth stressing over. Over the last year or so I’ve been having a dream that recurs every two months or so. The details are always different but I’m always at a race track, either in the paddock getting into the car, or even on the starting grid waiting for the pace lap. But something always comes up and the session gets delayed, and I always wake up before it can get started. I’m not an expert on interpreting dreams but I don’t think this one requires much interpretation. I’ve been trying to figure out how to get back to professional competition since I was forced to quit in 2007. A lot of my ideas have been somewhat outrageous, and the constant downward spiral of IndyCar racing has always made it seem like an increasingly unrealistic goal. 

But all that stands in my way now are these two things. SO close. Selling my old car, and getting a job. Both are very achievable. After years of frustration it’s slightly difficult to understand that there’s finally a very real chance I’ll be getting back on track in just an off-season’s time. But it needs to be at the forefront of my mind as I fight through the always-frustrating task of getting a job. 

As I mentioned in my last entry, this past weekend Austin and I attended the final round of the 2011 Formula Ford Championship, held at Silverstone. I have been to Silverstone once before, when I went to the F1 race in 2005. Although as anyone who follows Formula One knows, it has changed a lot in the last few years. Our goals for the weekend were to speak to the Formula Ford officials to sort of announce our intentions, get information on the new 2011 car (which will introduce turbo chargers and sequential transmissions), and gauge the overall mood of the series and the events in which it competes.

Overall, it was a success on all counts. We spoke to a lovely woman named Penny, who is the organizer for the series. She was very friendly and welcoming, and answered a lot of questions. Unfortunately it looks like the new car is a bit out of our reach, at around £50,000 (US$78,000). However, there will be a second class for older cars that will be run simultaneously, and with the top teams buying new cars, there should be a lot of high quality second hand formula fords flooding the market. And as anyone who has taken a freshman-year economics class 6 years ago knows, anytime there is an increase in supply without an increase in demand, price goes down ( or something like that, right? It was an 8am class so naturally I went on the first day and not again until midterms…).

The overall atmosphere of the event was more laid back than I expected, which has both positives and negatives. On the positive side, we will be welcomed in, even without a huge multi-car transporter and luxury hospitality suite. On the negative side, it will be more difficult to sell sponsorship to an event that doesn’t have an atmosphere with the buzz of a major event. Although, Silverstone is a massive facility, so perhaps at some of the smaller venues the crowd will seem larger. Another positive is that the laid back atmosphere didn’t detract from the competition at all. In the race that we saw, the lead changed many times, and the top 5 cars were all nose-to-tail the entire race. It occurred to me that for small, low horsepower cars like the Formula Ford, the Silverstone Grand Prix circuit is almost like Road America, with several very long straightaways and lots of opportunity for drafting.

So we have experienced a Formula Ford event, and overall it has confirmed that it is the place we want to be, and that if we work hard and things fall into place, we just might be able to pull this off. The next step is probably the hardest. In order to pay for garage space and the car, I need to find a job. I don’t really care what I’m doing, as long as it’s not cleaning septic tanks or laying asphalt, but it needs to pay well enough to cover my basic needs (rent, utilities, iRacing subscription, etc.) and the start-up costs for the team. So this might be where all those years at NYU finally come in handy. I’ve already started the search and haven’t found anything yet, but I know the economy is still swirling around the toilet and I probably didn’t do myself any favors by randomly moving to the middle of England.

So that’s whats happened in the last week, and I leave you for now with this thought: Smoked Bacon flavored potato chips! I found them at a store here in Lichfield and they’re amazing! Seriously, in a country that sells chocolate covered bacon, how have no chips manufacturers in the US thought of this yet?