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MSA British
Hill Climb Championship |
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Willem’s Hillclimb News – Prescott – 6/7 May 2006 Summary
However, these woes are minor compared to Bill’s – his little 600 decided to have “an electrical problem” when the conrod blew the electrics off the side of the block! He and “birthday boy” Lloyd, however, had done enough in the morning runs to finish 1st and 2nd in class with Bill just ahead. Details Car: Forced Pilbeam – Pride Cosworth Chassis: started as a Pilbeam but has been slightly “Forced” by Bill Chaplin and the ”boys” of Force Racing Weight of package: less than before (but still around 500kg) Engine: started as a Cosworth XD 2.65 litre V8 which has now been rebuilt and tuned by Neil Peters of Pride Engines and “Forced” by twin turbos installed by the Force team. Power: significantly more than before (Judd with 600hp), more than enough but a little hard to tame at the moment (I hadn’t realised when I signed the contract that the lion emblem for Pride Race Engineering meant I was going to get a wild animal for an engine!); significantly over 750bhp available and I mean significantly…… Wheelbase: 2.7m; track: “wide” - but not wide enough to put the power on the ground Tyres: super sticky wet compound Avon slicks - but not sticky enough to put the power on the ground Driver: on a diet (that costs less than taking it off the car!) but he might be better off eating more to get better traction! “Pipe” dreams of winning the championship were reduced significantly because we didn’t make any of the 3 pre-season tests. However, after failing to make the 4th scheduled test booked for the Thursday before this event, you could say we now need significant assistance from above. The end cause of not actually testing was relatively minor but the truth is that the whole system is a lot more complicated and involved to set up than originally thought, especially from the perspective of getting power from the bottom end of the rev range. Despite a lot of help and advice from Cosworth, PiResearch, Marc Amblard and many others, we were unable to solve the problems in time for Prescott. We’re going to try to find some improvements for the double header at Barbon and Harewood next weekend and then I’ll make a call on our direction. My feeling is that we may have to go back to concentrating on having some fun (I know, I know, that’s really the only reason we’re all doing it but sometimes it’s easy to forget in the heat of competition) while developing the car. It is also difficult juggling competing in the whole British hillclimb championship when living in Switzerland and there is a high price (financial and otherwise) to pay for work and for home life too. I've started my "official" arrive and drive "status" and am "commuting" back and forth from Switzerland with all that implies, including being at work on a Monday morning in time for the previous day’s race debrief!. Lots of rushing around both for me, for the lads and for my Swiss chauffeur (otherwise known as Sue). At Prescott, the car was just too unpredictable to drive (especially with a driver having my sort of enthusiasm) and that is why I purposefully used this event as a test – I’ll be having a big accident if I try to drive it as it is and I’m simply not prepared to do that given we’re not in a winning position. We've had a busy (and in some ways frustrating) few weeks between events on the Proud Forced Pilbeam. A planned test to try to control the power, and move the RPM range where we have it, didn't happen due to some last minute problems. A huge pity. However we've added lots of data logging (and unfortunately a tiny bit of weight) thanks to the help we've had from PiResearch. We're now not quite logging F1 quantities of sensors but were at least able to do some serious logging work which will help us with understanding and developing the car better in the future. Having missed the opportunity to test away from prying eyes we arrived in a bit of a state with some functionality testing to do on installation changes such as a new fuel pump. We then started setting about trying to find a car and engine setup combination that would work well with the usual hillclimbing problem of not many runs and dozens of things to change. On Saturday, we just had two practices but at least they were in the dry, which could not be said for everyone because it did shower more than once. The baseline, first, run was OK all considered but a little wild on the sliding side when the engine came on boost and revs. We had no choice but to change many things at once but the additional sensors we were able to log made a big difference to our ability to do so with reasonable intelligence and this showed in homing in quickly to a functioning setup. On Sunday, we tried to turn on traction control but it wasn’t working. However, we qualified in about the middle of the pack in a time that would have scored us points in both runoffs. For the first runoff we then did successfully turn on traction control but I had set it up too conservatively and acceleration was quite poor so I went a little slower and didn’t score any points. For the afternoon qualifying, still wanting to develop the traction system, I then “freed” it up a little – too much and had a few fairly lurid slides. This, combined with dropping off boost coming out of the Esses, pretty well removed any chance of qualifying. Pity – I felt sad for the boys with all the effort they had put in. The Morans had another good weekend with Scott ending up eading the championship and Roger 2nd, although Martin is now 3rd after winning both runoffs here. The results were: 1st Martin Groves Martin Groves 2nd Scott Moran Scott Moran 3rd Deryk Young Roger Moran 4th Simon Durling Mike Dean 5th Roger Moran Simon Durling 6th Rob Turnbull Rob Turnbull 7th Mike Dean Will Mason 8th Chris Merrick Paul Ranson 9th Will Mason Tom New 10th Mark Coley Jos Goodyear The top “10” places in the championship looks as follows: Scott Moran 36 Roger Moran 33 Martin Groves 29 Simon Durling 28 Rob Turnbull 19 Mike Dean 12 Tom New/Willem Toet 10 Paul Ranson 9 Chris Merrick/ Deryk Young 8 Will Mason 6 Life in Switzerland is good, although very busy from my point of view. Spring is definitely on its way here now with the meadow near the house yellow with dandelions and buttercups, the fruit trees in blossom and last week we had several days in the low 20s. I am cycling to and from work (which on most days involves 4 trips), although I did chicken out and take the car Friday lunchtime when it absolutely tipped it down and I did not want to get to work feeling like a drowned rat. Sue is meeting up with the wives and partners of new staff and they are setting up their own little support network to swap survival stories and help one another – needless to say we (men) don’t have the time to sort out residence permits, health insurance, etc. Sue is also taking the opportunity when I am away at weekends to explore the local area (she went to Zurich on Saturday) so that, when we have visitors, she knows what’s around. Thanks to Bill, Colin, Steve and Tony of Force (www.forceracingcars.co.uk); Neil, Gareth and Jo of Pride (www.PrideEngines.com); Duncan, Martin, Nicholas, Paul, Steve and Tom at PiResearch (www.piresearch.co.uk); Geoff at Cosworth (www.cosworth.com); Geoff at Turbo Technics (www.turbotechnics.com); Marc Amblard, Richard Marshall and Paul Edwards (www.edwards-hospitality.co.uk) for advice, help and support. Willem Picture: Jerry Sturman |
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No points this weekend I’m afraid (came 11th in the first runoff and didn’t
qualify for the second) but we learned quite a lot for the future. Prescott is a
technical track and low speed so a car with little bottom end power and
difficult to control power delivery isn’t exactly ideal! We suffered a bit from
that, combined with driver enthusiasm. I gave up some pretty solid points to try
to develop the car (engine power control and traction control) because it just
isn’t a potential winner at present. Still we have a car in one piece and a
chance to score better in the next events.