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Racing Diary – Part 6 So with the first race out of the way and what a wet one it was the Radical was back in the garage. The next race is only 3 weeks away but we don’t have a lot to do with the car. One of the issues in the race was not knowing what gear I was in, being a sequential gearbox it was very easy to get lost in. In the wet where you are using more of the torque than outright power it was easy to loose count of the gears. With this in mind I made a trip to my local motorbike shop, Peter Hammonds, and had look through their catalogues to see what I could find that would do my job. I found a small device that used the speed vs rpm to tell what gear you are in on a motorbike. This looked like it would do the trick on the Radical so I ordered it up, from the past experience with getting the tacho working I also ordered a shift light to help me confirm that we are getting a good tacho trigger. The kit arrived and Justin and I set about fitting it. It did evolve taking the side pods off the car which is a bit of a task but we are becoming well practised at doing it now. As suspected the tacho signal from the coils didn’t work and the shift light didn’t work at all. Next step was out with a engine diagnostic meter and find the right wire that give a decent trigger signal. With this found we spliced a new wire into the loom and fed this to the dash. The shift-light were setup, funny how the neighbours loose their sense of humour when you are revving a bike engine to 11000rpm on a Sunday afternoon. Needless to say we did the setup quickly so not to upset to many people. The Radical doesn’t have speedo drive so we fitted a speed sensor to the front wheel. With this all wired into the gear indicator we would have to wait until Combe before we can test it because you need to run the on the track to get a speed. So with this job done the next little job was to try and reduce the wind buffeting that I was experiencing on the high speed parts of the track. I cheated a bit hear and purchased a new screen from Radical, this one is slightly taller and has a lip on the leading edge which I am hoping will deflect the air over me. The weekend before the meeting I set about converting the car back to dry settings, optimistic I know but it can’t rain again, can it! When running the car in the wet we had everything softened up so with this in mind I take a gamble and soften the suspension up more than we have done before. The idea is to get the car riding the bumps at Combe properly and not shake the car around. Last job is to bleed the brake system so ensure that there is no air in there. In doing so I manage to shear off one of the nipples, I knew it was only a matter of time before this would happen! Luckily I had pre-empted this and recently bought a new set of nipples "just in case". Once nice feature of the Wilwood calipers is that the nipples are housed in a brass holder which can be removed from the caliper so there is no drilling out required, just a quick unbolt old holder and fit new one…job done! With all the jobs done we are ready for the meeting on Monday, read the race report (here) to see how it went!
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