BlueSquare Motorsport Blog

Well, after taking the Clio to Colin Stancombe to let him have a quick look over it after our last two track days and our trip to Spa, Colin has convinced me to do this years Renault Sport Winter Series over the weekend of 6/7th November at Rockingham. The Friday is a practice day, and then two races on the Saturday preceded by the qualifying in the morning. Really looking forward to it, my first time in a race event, and no better way to start than jumping in at the deep end! More details to follow!

We’ve just returned from a three day event at Spa, Belgium, where it poured with rain for the entire event!

This was my first real hard drive of the Clio in torrential rain conditions, and yet again the Clio surprised me at how well it handles in the wet conditions, pretty much the same as it handles in the dry to be honest, (using the full wet setup of course).

No major issues whilst we were there, except our friend Stuart managed to put their new BMW M3 into the pit wall aquaplaning !

Some photo’s of the Spa trip are below, but they can be all found here:

We took quite a number of employees of the BlueSquare Data Group out to a track day today at nearby RAF Odiham, givingplenty of hot laps in the Clio Cup surprising the petrol head employees of what a little Clio can do!

Photos of the event can be found here.

The main problem with taking people out in the Clio is that you can’t talk to them as its so loud inside, even shouting does not work.

Also, the noise starts to hurt after a good few laps, and ear plugs tend to fall out when used with our ‘cheap’ helmets. As such I’ve bought two Peltor intercom helmets from Demon Tweaks which are silenced and also allow connection to an intercom system so the driver and passenger can talk to one another.

Will test them on Sunday at Odiham.

After the work done by Colin Stancome we took the Clio to a trackday to test it all out. All worked very well indeed and the Clio felt solid as a rock. We also tried the car with the wet tyres as it was raining at the start of the day. These provided a pretty good level of grip, more than I expected to be honest, but I’ve now found unless they are used when its ‘proper’ wet, they wear very quickly indeed and start to pull the tread blocks apart.

Swapped back to slicks once the track dried up and had a good blast, even keeping up with a Ferrari 430 Challenge car in the corners (Straights he left me for dead!)

Next day out is Sunday 6th when we go back to RAF Odiham and the BlueSquare  lads are coming for passenger rides etc, which should be good.

Spoke to Colin yesterday who has now fixed the Clio.

The exhaust manifold appears to be fine, so does the radiator and everything else that could have been damaged which is great news. The steering rack has been fitted, gearbox oil changed, tracking completed on front and back wheels, geometry done, gearbox shims setup and software updated for the ‘F’ problem on the up changes.

All in all £720 which I’m very pleased about!!

Hopefully collect it on Monday, next track day booked for the 26th August
.

Dropped the Clio off to Colin tonight and he immediately saw the reason for the steering rack breaking – the engine stabiliser bar had come undone, the bolt holding it on is missing! This would have caused pressure on the steering rack and caused it to snap. Unfortunately he also said it may have damaged/broke the exhaust manifold as these are weak on the Clio’s anyway, he will have a look to see if any hairline cracks are there.

Whilst there going to check everything else, change gearbox oil again, re-align the front and rear wheels and re-setup the gearbox software and shims.
Also mentioned the way we strap the car to the trailer is totally wrong and will damage both the front and rear wheel geometry, so he will check that too

Colin will phone with the price tomorrow….

I thought the best route to fix it would be by one of the race teams that race the Clio in the Cup championship, as they would know it inside out, as opposed to a local motorsport garage.

So, I looked on ClioCup.com to see what teams were based nearby, and found Stancombe Vehicle Engineering in Essex.

Gave them a call and Colin Stancombe answered who seemed very knowledgeable and helpful. Basically he seemed to be the man to fix the Clio, and gave me some good advice RE the shims (in that I was doing it completely wrong, and needed to remove them, not add them!) as well as telling me to use the clutch when downshifting, even though the handbook says otherwise (and Colin’s advice made a lot of sense) as well as informing me about the engine bracing (which may have been set incorrectly from the factory, as when we changed the gearbox oil the cross brace did not line up with the gearbox oil drain plug, and the whole engine/gearbox shifted back about 1.5″, which *could* have meant part of it was resting on the steering rack, causing extra stress which caused it to sheer at Silverstone).

Anyway, will take the Clio up to him next week to see what he says……

Today we went on a Track Day at Silverstone Southern Cicruit, which was an open pit lane all day event. We took the Clio and the Nissan 300ZX twin turbo as well, with Dad and Stuart coming as they co-own the Nissan, and Stuarts son James.
Day started well, went though the briefing etc and then lined up to go out on track. The day before we gave the Clio its mandatory 50km gearbox oil change(!) as well as putting an extra shim on the engine cut out switch, as directed to do so by the owners manual, once its needed, as the electronic dash was telling me on the Clio.

Went out on a slow lap in the Clio only to find the Sequential gearbox would not change up or down without using the clutch, so guess the extra shim did not work
Back to the pits and I removed the extra shim and put it back to standard, went out to re-test and it seemed a lot better, so carried on and done a few more laps. All was well.

Stuart and James were still out in the Nissan, they came in briefly to swap over and went back out again, so I took Dad out in the Clio, with him driving for the first time.
The gearbox seemed to be getting clunkier, so much so it was starting to be quite violent when changing gear, so we came back to the pits and I added the smallest shim we had to the cut off switch.

We could see Stuart down in the lower paddock with smoke coming from the engine of the Nissan, so we drove down to find then engine had stalled on track and they had coasted back to the pits, with what looked like over heating. The 16 year old Nissan’s first engine problem in over 30+ track days and Nurburgring trips! Poor old girl…

Dad started to fill it with water, but it boiled back over straight away. We let it cool down and filled it up, but it still would not start. After a bump start it spewed out steam through the exhaust pipes which confirmed the worst… head gasket has blown As the car is 16+ years old its too much trouble to change it, so it will be going to scrap… all that fun and history died along with it too.

Anyway, I went back out in the Clio to test the gearbox again. Pulled onto the track, changed from 2nd to 3rd, so far so good. On entry to the corner, downchanged from 3rd to 2nd and ‘clunk’. Strange. Went to turn into the corner and the steering was very light, turned more and nothing, carried on in a straight line! Stopped on the grass and got out, by this time they had closed the track and come over in a recovery truck. Lifted the bonnet to find the steering rack had snapped off of its two mountings!!! In a two week old car!!!

Not very pleased, but they lifted the car onto the lorry and I got a lift back to the pits. Thankfully the chap lifted the Clio straight onto the trailer as we didn’t have a winch, which was handy.

So, track day number two and a broken Clio, and a Nissan with a blown head gasket. Not great!

Will see what we can do about the Clio over the next few days…

Today we took the Clio to RAF Odiham for its first trackday. The track day was in aid of ‘Help for Heros’ and was an all day open pit lane event.

I met fellow PH’er Tuscan_Al there who helped, along with my neighbour who also came for some passenger rides and to help.

All was going well until we went to drive the Clio off of the trailer, and the skids/ramps flipped up as the back wheels went over them on the way down as they were not level, which made the front of the ramps disconnect from the trailer and fall to the floor, this left the Clio stuck on the back of the trailer with the front wheels dangling down, and being held up by the front of the car stuck on the back of the trailer. Typical. Luckily no damage done to car and trailer, and with a borrowed jack, Alex managed to lift the front of the car up, Daniel moved the trailer forward and we lowered the Clio back down to earth.

After that we went for the briefing and started on track.
The Clio needed some time to warm the slick tyres up to temp, but once they were warm it absolutely flew! We were all amazed how quickly the Clio went, and round the corners it was a different league to 99.9% of the other cars on the track day. We overtook new Porsche GT3’s, and a GT2 being driven by Derek Bell which made my day!

The RAF let us take some photo’s of the Clio up against a Chinook Helicopter which was great!

Some photos of today’s event can be found in the Gallery at: http://www.munson.me/gallery/OdihamJuly09

Last but not least some Video’s of the Clio on track, thanks to Alex for uploading them!