The rear was too soft on that last run to the finish there, the course suddenly dried out a lot after lunch and there was more grip everywhere, needed stiffening back up but since it was the last run not much point

Whilst it is surely great fun I would struggle, even in what looks like open ground, to not find a tree or wall to bump into !

Oh there's plenty of walls and trees, it's only open as you come into the finish or start there where the pits are

The course was 8 miles long and drops down into the forest in the valley there.

Anyone want to play spot the difference?





Also on the front albeit a little trickier...





Anyway, all the play taken out and things rebuilt, so hopefully we don't have all that positive camber that appeared at Walters.
The root cause of that was we bent all four link pins in the front arms and it mashed the bronze/teflon bushes in the front end as you can see from the pic - they're 18mm diameter and made from EN9 but it's evidently not quite strong enough (about the same strength as a bolt) - the old ones used to be made from EN36 but we couldn't get a small piece of material in that at the time. It's got the spares in for now but looks like it's time to hunt and get it back on the stronger pins...

The rear's have just taken impacts from a few rocks on the course unfortunately, nothing a bit of time with a hammer to straighten couldn't fix, just a pain to take off with the bent bolts.



Done some fine tuning on the geometery too, still trying to dial out some understeer, so this time around a chunk less rear toe in and a touch more toe out on the front.

The stronger bolts are materials are the first step but the large forces will still be there and seek out the next weakest link...

Make sure you keep your seats padded !

Nah the old pins were stronger stuff before this and they coped fine, just need to get back on the right material.

So you know those bent bolts we only just fixed?



Think we better get some more made. Whoops.
Bit of a slip up, overshot a turning a bit and got dragged towards a ditch, spun the car around on the fiddle brakes and found out at the wrong time that there was a big bloody rock in the ditch too, cracked the bottom arm, bent both link pin bolts again. Limped it back but put it on the trailer and came home as we didn't have spares made for those new bottom arms yet.

The good news, the geometery changes worked perfectly, the car was top 5 the first run and we were getting faster - we could have had 4th today easily I think without that, and I think if we pick up another 10-20s of pace in the car maybe have the occassional challenge for top 3.

Which, given the conditions for us with only 2wd, was amazing - it was torrential rain for two days, and some of the mud and puddles were so deep it washed over through the side doors and up the roof scoops - we had a lap full of 50 litres of cold water for 2 stages. That sort of pace on that course had a lot of people suddenly coming over to look at the car wondering what we'd done to it
Some tweaks I did to the mapping last week have fixed 90% the horrible flatspot it had right on a gearchange before vtec too so that helped a fair bit.

Overall, little sad about bending it - was a silly slip and it wasn't even really from pushing the pace just a lapse while trying to clear the windows (the washer jets blocked up) and losing out on a good result, on the other hand, it's an easy fix and the changes made to the car are really, really promising for next season.

large rocks always win as they have nothing that absorbs the impact and tend to dig into the earth rather than move lucky you got away relatively lightly

There's some new uprights for the front have been waiting to be welded up for about two years so I guess it's finally time.

I've had an upgrade planned for years for the front uprights, we just never got around to jigging and welding them up, which do away with those two link pin/pivot bolts completely:



With a complete new upright, revised front geometery and the advantage over the old VW style stuff of not needing to deliberately have a little play in all the links to let it cycle without massive friction:



So, I think we'll get on with fitting that instead. It's a sign.

Got a couple more event pics too

Even with those attractive new uprights I think you'd be well advised to avoid ditches and rocks !

You don't get to avoid ditches in this sport 

Looking suspiciously close to rocks and ditches !