The weather at Castle Combe started as what no seems to be a typical British summer day - cloudy, windy, a bit chilly and threatening to rain
.
Andy returned the car from his first run and handed it over to me. As the marshalls tried to roll it forward to the start line, it appeared that the brakes were binding on slightly
.
It slowed me by a couple of seconds on Andy's time and on returning to the pits, the front wheels were a little too hot to touch. Having jacked the car up, the front wheels were difficult to turn and the rears less so, probably due to the reduced rear braking on the manual bias adjustment. They gradually free-ed off over the next 5 minutes of their own accord.
It all points to a sticky master cylinder, it didn't happen again during the day but we will have to investigate
.
Andy returned the car from his second run, and once again handed it over to me. When I restarted the engine it sounded like a bag of nails. Lifting the bonnet revealed that the hyraulic pump had lost it's locking nut complete with the belt tensioning assembly
. The slack belt dragging on the pump causing a terminal sounding noise was quickly fixed with an M8 nut and bolt
.
My second run turned out to be the quickest of the day between the both of us, by a good second, but it was unfortunately just practice
.
The sun came out over lunch and it got quite warm. With Castle Combe being fast and long corners, it works the tyres quite hard. We found that the tyre pressures were increasing by a good 4 or 5 psi over the run and it was difficult to find a balance. We couldn't drop the cold pressures too much as Andy would enter the first corner with underinflated tyres. But by the end of the lap they were over inflated.
We must be getting faster and closer to the limit, to experience the car drifting through lack of grip in the middle of a 100mph corner
.
So much for 4 wheel drive and 235 soft, sticky Toyo triple 8 tyres
.
Looking forward to Oulton Park now. Only a couple of weeks way
.