Ok, I've done it again, i've kept you all out of the loop a bit but with a couple of less than encouraging results over the last month I was starting to think that may be I'm just not meant to be doing this sort of thing.
We went to a huge amount of effort to get to Castle Combe for a regional heat and after some fantastic times in practice we started feeling reasonably confident. A loss of power then cost us an hour in the pits.
At this point I said, pack up, we're going home, it's time to call an end to the whole project (I had to drive the car in a van 4hrs back to essex then a further 3.5hrs back home to Nottingham) However, the tenacity of the team saw us back out for the last half hour of the race. We even finished higher than some cars that had raced the duration, and we claimed our first fastest lap!
We had just one weekend between Castle Combe and the National Final at Goodwood so rather than making any radical changes I elected to refine several areas of the car.
Now before I tell you about our final here are a few refresher facts;
Our record 1.5hr distance is 50.4miles
This year we have slightly less power available
We are also required to pit once to change batteries so we lose about 1min or so to that, including speed limited pit time.
Right, so we arrived around 8.20am ish, we'd been scrutineered the day before so it was all about making sure we'd got everything ready for practice. We were the fourth car out which left us with a pretty clear run of the circuit.
We came in and checked the datalogger, everything seemed perfect, not just close, but perfect.
I was just swapping the batteries over when I spotted something out of the corner of my eye. There was a drawing pin in the side of our tyre (yes side of our 120psi tyre... Not leaving the car over night again) A lightening fast swap sorted that out and we were able to line up on the second row of the grid.
When the flag was dropped, I took a nice easy pull away, after our reliability issues this season, I didn't want to hammer the transmission. This saw us lose out on about 1 position, slowly gaining on the 5 cars ahead of us picking one off at a time.
Just before we entered Lavant we overtook the car that was in the lead... this isn't a feeling I'm used to. I couldn't picture it lasting the whole race so I just tried to relax, and enjoy the moment as I entered the start finish straight knowing that my friends and family would be able to see what we had achieved, that moment alone was as good as a victory.
Lap times fell well below anything we've achieved before and a full minute faster than we had been at this circuit earlier in the year.
Lap after lap we pulled out further, much to my disbelief but the years of hard work really had finally paid off.
The team pulled me in at the half way mark to swap to our second set of batteries, these were quite clearly not as punchy as the first but we were well on our way.
As time marched on our lead grew, to an extraordinary (for us) 2 laps (2.4miles each at goodwood) That was... Until...
.. the end of the race... there will be no "and then disaster struck" moments today, we did it! We've finally achieved one of our dreams. We had won the F24+ National Final, setting not only a personal best, but a new competition record with 55.2miles completed in 1.5hours,
Thank you all for your contributions towards making this happen, whether it was just a show of support or technical advice, it all made a big difference. So thank you.
I should have some pictures soon but for the time being, here is quick clip of us from yesterday.
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qoy0iamwggo[/youtube]
And for those of you looking for the next big thing in vehicle design..
..here's my linkedin Profile
http://www.linkedin.com/pub/luke-horsfall/28/74/b01
at the moment if it were CF it's quite plausible we could knock off about 15kg from that at least which is about 25% the overall weight. I'm convinced we can also shake off a further 7kg and gain some more drive efficiency too. I genuinely think that come our next race in September we could knock off 40% of the "dry" weight!