Finally Got To Drive It!!

Well, I drove it last Friday and it was AWESOME!!  I took the car to Eric Langbein's shop the Tuesday before and we did a complete set-up (which went pretty smoothly) and he finished making my shift linkage.  It really felt comfortable right out of the box -- mostly due to the "safe" (more towards understeer than oversteer) setup that Eric put on the car.  The only time you need to use the clutch is to get going so I was left braking and I found out that I really need to work on my shifting.  I just need to perfect the timing of the throttle blipping with the engaging of the lower gear when I'm down shifting.  I pretty much have the upshifts down although they can use some improvement as well.  I did go faster every session and here is a video of my fastest lap.  But this by no means a fast lap -- I left lots of time on the table!  Btw, the gear numbers are not correct.  For some reason it jumps from 2nd to 4th instead of 2nd to 3rd.

Driving the car was great but we did have one issue that we expended a lot of time and effort on.  Unfortunately the data system was showing that I was losing fuel pressure in the corners.  Here is what we were looking at:

The blue line shows lateral gs (in other words, the peaks and valleys show left and right hand corners) and the red line shows the fuel pressure.  There is definitely a correlation between cornering and the fuel pressure dropping and we did lots of things to try to resolve the issue but to no avail.  As a result, I decided to withdraw from the race weekend.  However, I'm glad I did because I was tired!!  I hadn't driven a race car in over a year and driving this car took a lot out of me! 

We really thought that there was an issue with the fuel cell (which is brand new) so I planned to call the manufacture on Monday.  I did pull the fuel cell over the weekend after I pumped the fuel out of it using the fuel pump and there was virtually no fuel left in it -- which meant that the pickup seemed to be working the way it should.  I could also tell that the pickup was fastened to the bottom of the cell.  So these two facts pretty much ruled out the cell as being the issue.  The one fact that was sticking in my mind was that I never got real consistent fuel pressure readings.  I actually thought of this before I pulled the cell but my fuel pressure sensor was mounted in a 45 degree fitting in the fuel regulator.  I used the 45 degree fitting due to space limitations and I think that there might have been an air bubble in that fitting.  I moved the fuel pressure sensor to a different location and no more fluctuation of fuel pressure!  I'm cautiously optimistic that fixed the problem but I obviously need to run the car again to be sure.

Overall it was a great day.  I got a good feel for the car and I will practice the timing of my shifting using my online simulator.  If the worst problem is an air bubble in front of the fuel pressure sensor than that isn't so bad!