Messages

Well done Lien, Tom, Wayne and all the crew at Gadget Racing.

[Team/car Name]

I'm hoping to fill in some missing info in the car database and wondered if anyone has any contact details (email addresses, phone numbers, company names where they worked - anything really) for the owners of the following cars:

Team/car Name	Last seen	Last Race#	Owner/Entrant name
BTM Racing	2009	88	Fergus Mcleod
Crusader Vans 2	2008	48	Martin Sadler
2 Smoking Barrels	2007	77	Jon Davies
John-Paul Wilkinson		99	John-Paul Wilkinson
Laurence Broadhurst			Laurence Broadhurst
Simon Pearson			Simon Pearson
Murfcedes			Paul Murphy

If you do, please can you PM me rather than replying to this post.

Hi cavebloke, it is still for sale. Send Pete Sparrow a text on 07557 388 828 - he's mega busy at the moment, but he will get back to you. Or send me a PM with your contact details. We'll all be meeting this weekend at Cadwell.

A couple of people have asked where the UK Hybrid regulations are. They can be found here: http://www.2cvracing.org.uk/joinus/ at the bottom of the page is a link to the .pdf file.

Sorry this took a while, but here are some photos of the cage harness bar we use in our team. Ideally the bar should be less than 400mm behind the centre line of the drivers shoulders (see https://www.schrothracing.com/sdocs/2009_Competition_Instructions.pdf page 13 and 14). We have a steel band wrapped around the harness bar that a pair of standard seat belt eyebolts are attached to. This allows you to get the angle of the shoulder straps within the 0 to -20 degrees range by either mounting the eyebolts from the top or from underneath. The steel bands are welded to the harness bar to ensure they can't rotate or slide from side to side.

From the photos, it looks like the harness bar is a bit high, but when I'm sat in the car the belts are right at the top of the seat apertures and my belts run just under horizontal (about -1 degree). In cars 52 and 92, we put the harness bar in a bit lower so it is more suitable for different height drivers. The shoulder strap angle stays in the 0 to -20 degree range for all drivers in the team.

[NOT]

Here are the draft regulations for the UK Hybrid Class. These are all Technical Regulations and are strongly based on the UK Club Class Technical Regulations. They are based on our experience from preparing a car for a 6 hour race at Zandvoort in June and preparing 2 cars for the Spa 24 hour race in October. There are still some diagrams to create, but I wanted to let everyone know what our thoughts were in some detail before the AGM.

Please remember that these regulations do NOT allow cars in this class to race in the UK at any event organised by the Classic 2CV Racing Club.

Thanks Trevor,
I've changed the Proposed Regulation Text to reflect your comments. The reference to the FiA publication remains as it was.

Well done Chris - it looks great and the things people need are at hand now.

Great posts everyone. The debate is starting to tease out out some common threads and remembering of mistakes past. I wasn't a member when the Club Cam was developed, but I've heard a number of people say that it was the start of reliability problems. How was it introduced? Were a few engines with different cam profiles built and tested throughout a racing season? If so, what class did they run in and who paid for the development?

The same thing applies to the Weber. I joined the year it was allowed, but I didn't experience its introduction. How was that tested before being allowed?

If we're going to make any major changes to the technical regulations, surely it makes sense for them to be tested in race cars over a full racing season. Bench/rolling road testing doesn't tell you about the implementation challenges that everyone is going to face before and at the circuit. The problem with testing is that someone (or preferably more than one) is going to have to race a season without points and finding volunteers is going to be tricky. Having said that, I'm prepared to volunteer to be a guinea-pig for whatever the membership decides is a way forward.

On the point about technical proposals, I think we could have a later cut-off date. After all, the technical proposals for 2015 have not been published yet and it's 2 months after the cut-off date. I've been volunteered to take on the role of Regulations Coordinator and I've suggested that the Technical Committee draft and publish the regulation wording BEFORE the AGM. The membership attending the AGM then get to vote on the actual wording being proposed, rather than voting on an idea that then has to be drafted after the AGM. With this small change, it should allow us to easily submit our regulations to BARC within the deadline and the membership get to see what they're voting for before it get's published. I don't see the need to move the AGM date.

Abolish the Club class - that's an interesting idea. My first thought is how would we stop people using the club cam and all the other developments built into the 100 or so race engines that exist? How would we overcome all the problems that existed when the Solex was being used that led to the introduction of the Weber? Injection maybe? I'm not sure that would level the playing field, increase reliability and reduce costs. I believe the only way to contain costs is to have regulations that state 'No modifications allowed' everywhere.

Trevor, did you have something specific in mind that the club should spend its cash on?

Guys,
I'm not saying BMW is the way to go. I wanted to illustrate why we built a car with a BMW engine. I think Pete has a point about moving the reliability problem elsewhere, but I don't know what the issues will be. We're racing it again at Spa in the 24hr and this will give us a better idea of the problems we might face.

I'm sure there will be a load of different issues with the C1 engine/transmission idea and the installation may be more challenging than the BMW.

I hope you guys will have some more ideas of how we can level the playing field and reduce the annual cost of racing.

To get a proper understanding of how these conversions might perform perhaps we could allow selected prototypes to race a season (without points). The Belgians have an 'Experimental' class for this purpose and they tested 3 prototype gearboxes last year. Perhaps we could do something similar.

Still recovering from one of the best races in any calendar (my thanks to everyone for making Anglesey GREAT), but in the cold light of day I'm looking at what I've got to do in preparation for next season. I've got 2 engines and both were rebuilt at the beginning of this season. The engine we ran at Anglesey was significantly slower at the end of the race than at the beginning and the other engine is 3 seconds a lap off the pace. Both need rebuilding and I'm smarting at the cost. Kris built an engine for Anglesey and it had £1200 of bits and services (rolling road time and travel etc.) in it. He did all the labour (porting the heads, setting the cam timing, cleaning everything and carefully putting it together) on top of the parts cost. I'm probably looking at around £1250 each for my engine rebuilds plus setting them up and getting the fuelling right.

So, my thoughts turn to 'How can I make this cheaper? Can I continue to spend £3000 every year on engine rebuilds, rolling road time and extra testing time?'. Over the past 3 years I've made some mistakes and used the wrong people to do things (Sammie has rescued me on every occasion), but I've spent the best part of £15k on my car – almost entirely on engine work. I thought 2CV racing was going to be the cheapest form of motorsport and in truth it isn't.

There have been many ideas about having a level playing field and reducing costs over the last couple of years. We've had the 'Injection' idea, the 'BMW R1100' idea, the 'C1 engine & gearbox' idea and probably some others. I'm not proposing anything other than let's have some discussion about the future of the club and the sustainability of racing costs. We've had a good turnout for the sprint races this season, but the 24hr was disappointingly supported (there may be many other reasons for this) by 2CVs and without the Minis and Euros we would have faced big losses for the event.

The future of 2CV racing is being challenged by parts getting scarcer, the quality of some aftermarket spares falling and cars getting more valuable. We can stick our heads in the sand and ignore the fact that the world is changing or we can start thinking about how we can adapt to this changing world.

Let's start a discussion about reducing costs. Let's not just think about maintaining them, but actually reducing them. The BMW idea was started on this basis. The economics were simple. Pay less than £3k in the first season to buy an engine and a fitting kit and then pay for a gearbox rebuild and engine oil change (£350) in each subsequent season. Total engine costs over the first 3 seasons = £3700 for BMW compared with £9000 for 602cc. It's a no-brainer economically, but there are other issues and opportunities.

There are other ideas and one that I immediately scoffed at was using the Citroen C1 engine and transmission. I've recently looked at C1 engines and gearboxes on eBay and they're staggeringly cheap. There's more to this idea than I first thought and it solves a number of challenges that the BMW might have. We ought to investigate further.

As I've said, I'm not making any proposal except that we need to discuss this and think about the future. Maybe you can think about this before the AGM and we could move forward with ideas you have then – or decide to do nothing.

Right, need to find my asbestos underpants and a fire/bullet proof suit.

There are very specific instructions for fitting belts with a Hans device which you can find here: https://www.schrothracing.com/sdocs/2009_Competition_Instructions.pdf. It is amazing what happens to the shoulder straps in a frontal impact at just 31mph.

The jist of these instructions are that shoulder straps should be mounted on the cage cross member (not on the floor) and the angle should be between horizontal and 20 degrees down (not up) from the driver's shoulder bone. The distance between the shoulder straps mounting point is crucial and there is a table on page 13 and 14 in the instructions that describes how they should be fitted.

If you want to wrap the shoulder straps around the cross member, Schroth make a special buckle designed for that purpose.

I'll try and post a picture of the cross member and fittings I made for Nick's car (52) tomorrow.

We use the yellow baby puke stuff too. It's called Red Line Superlight Shockproof Gear Oil and is indeed available from Demon Tweeks and other lubricant emporiums.

We used it very successfully in the gearbox of the BMW car we raced at Zandvoort. There was a rumor (probably started by me) that we had gearbox problems. On further investigation the gearbox was fine and put up with 6 hours of running and 3 hours of Tovey abuse under full race conditions (including a start that passed most of the field of euro Hybrid racers https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-M_tc6lVflg&feature=youtu.be). My 'off' was caused by an oil pipe coming off the oil cooler (wrong hose clamp fitted) and spraying hot engine oil all over the driver's side tyres. It created a personal oil slick I just couldn't get away from ::).

I've just discovered that ECAS are having a 2 week shutdown from later this week (Thursday 23rd July, I think). You may want to order some tyres for Anglesey before Roy disappears on his hols.

I've finally got round to doing the standard opening front window drawing. There are 'top' and 'bottom' window drawings attached.