Saturday, April 25, 2009

It could happen to anyone - once.

First for the non race goers a bit of background. When you are drag racing you want to get the car from stationary to moving as quickly and efficiently as possible. To do this you need the driven wheels of your car to grip the track. The track is sticky, but you are always looking for more grip. So before you race you warm the tyres up to make them sticky. If you are lucky you have a way to apply your brakes only to the non driven wheels. In our case we have a line lock to do this. So far so good. The track today wasn't as sticky as we would like, we expected that, but the first run was very disapointing. We checked the car and got ready to run again. As we were leaving the pit Tet noticed the car wasn't behaving right, it felt like a brake was jammed on... You guessed it, the line lock was on. Funnily the next run was somewhat better, taking the brakes off does help. I was pretty hopefull for our next run, but 14.7 seconds is not at all right for our car. Tet had been worried it wasn't running right and the walk back to the pit was stressful. What had we broken? The nut behind the wheel, he had left the linelock on! Argh. Well at least it is easier to fix than I had feared, I have a new signal to give to make sure the brake is off. Although we did notice that it stopped us spinning the wheels off the line, so in a warped way it did help.

Despite getting more runs than usual, I managed to get quite a lot of writing done too. I think I just have one more chapter of my second book to write now. Obviously todays work will need illustrating when I get home, but it was good progress. I also made a good start on a pattern too. Hopefully I will finish that and get well into a second pattern tomorrow. It's amazing where you can find spare time if you really look for it.

1 comment:

Jo Hopwood said...

Funny, we fire cannons for fun, and you would be amazed at what little glitches can occur - I have every sympathy!