Mallory Park August 25^th

So this was the first meeting with what we believed to be our freshly repaired engine with the blown head gasket replaced, hopefully increasing our straight line speed which we had been struggling with in previous rounds.

So, on to qualifying. For the first lap everything was fine, there wasn’t much grip but the tyres were stone cold, so not to worry. However, for the next couple of laps the engine developed a terrible miss-fire, and made the MR2 almost un-driveable. So I came into the pits and told a couple of the Montana Motorsport guys what the problem was. They pushed the HT leads in and wiggled the wires about and sent me back out onto track. Amazingly, that completely cured the problem, but it also lost me a lot of time to put in some decent laps. I also soon realised our tyre pressures weren’t right, as it took so long for them to warm up that I only had one or two decent laps at the end with the car still feeling rather floaty. My feelings that the car wasn’t right were proven by my qualifying position of 11^th for the first race.

Race 1
I knew I had a lot of work to do to get towards the front of the pack, so had to make a good start. When the lights went out I got an excellent launch, but as there were cars every side of me I had no-where to go and was boxed in. As the race progressed, I wasn’t making my usual progress towards the front and found myself stuck in a battle with a few cars towards to middle of the pack. To me, it still seemed that my car was considerably down on power on the straights as almost everyone pulled away from me. In the end I finished 9^th which I wasn’t very pleased with, but felt the car wasn’t at its usual speed.
 

Race 2
I qualified 14^th for the second race (seconds fastest qualifying lap) and really had to get my head down if I wanted a decent finishing position. Again I got a good launch but had no where to go. I ended up in a battle for about 13^th place, but at which point the car really felt unwell. The power seemed to have dropped some more and the gearbox was becoming increasingly clunky. I lost out on the battle about half way through the race and watched, frustrated, as the cars in front of me that I would normally be faster than were pulling away lap by lap, with nothing I could do about it. By the end of the race, changing down to 2^nd gear for the hairpin was impossible as it simply would not go in. On more than one occasion I found myself coasting around it, desperately trying to get it into 1^st which was nearly impossible as well. The gearbox was giving up, every down shift getting harder and more notchy, every up shift becoming clunkier. I’m not sure where I finished to be honest, but I think about 15^th.

When returning to the paddock, it turned out my car had blown much of it’s anti-freeze out of the expansion tank, covering the back of the MR2 in pink fluid and spattering the windscreen of cars behind. It was obviously very unwell and we could hear that what was left of the cooling fluid was still boiling.

Upon further investigation we came to the conclusion that the head gasket has not been changed as we could see the old one  still in there. This would account for the problems. A wet and dry compression test will be required tomorrow to confirm our suspicions.

Overall, a very disappointing event, but now we know that there’s something seriously wrong with the engine which accounted for my poor results. We expect that for the next event in two weeks at Cadwell we’ll have a replacement gearbox, and probably a replacement engine too while the current one is sorted out, but we’ll keep you posted.

Update: Compression test has been carried out and 1 of the four cylinders is seriously below what it should be, which explains the poor performance.

Thanks to our sponsors: