Silverstone Experience Day

I probably wont be doing any track days in the S2000 for a while but finally had a chance this weekend to cash in my 'Silverstone Single Seater Experience' voucher my wife bought be back last Christmas.

I wasn't expecting too much - the Aston Martin day I did a few years back was fun but was disappointing because the instructors didn't allow you give really open it up. I was expecting something similar on the single seater day but was massively impressed - after the initial few laps behind a pace car your were allowed to really give it some! Weather had been a little wet so the track was quite greasy but really good fun.

The cars were only 1.6 cosworth engines but weighed around 500kg so very nippy with excellent handling - even better than the Elise. I was a little disappointed with the fact that we weren't running on the main Silverstone circuit but aside from that it was an excellent day. Managed 24 laps in the main session, finished 2nd in the 'race' and had the third fastest lap time.

Very tempted to do another one.

Moving on...

Been a while since I updated the blog, anyway a few months ago I finally decide to sell the Elise. I had it for 6 great years but I finally decided to get something a little more sensible. It sailed off to sunny Yorkshire a few weeks ago to start competing in hillclimbs, sprints and the like.


Sad to see if go but its been replaced with something only slightly more practical. Twice the weight means it needs twice the power (240bhp) but has waay more than twice the luxury:




Its a very different beast to the Elise, you can feel the extra weight and have to rev the nuts off it to get fast acceleration but its so much quieter, comfier, warmer, less wet, practical, easier to take the roof down.. I could go on.

In any case, I'm still getting used to it and I'm sure it'll take a while to get used to not having the Elise but it was a good choice.

To track or not to track; that is the question...

She lives

Finally got the car back from the garage this week. The problem that caused the breakdown on the trackday was caused by the exhaust manifold. It had sheared off at the top of the downpipe. AA P&L came in handy again - I now have a shiney Janspeed 4-2-1 manifold installed.

Also replaced the 2 front tyres and got the replacement clutch trunion fitted.

BE MRTG Scripts

Just a quick one but a little while ago a joined the excellent ISP BE. The services comes with their own BEbox modem (a rebranded thompson) which doesnt look to have any SNMP support. Being a true geek I had to monitor the connection stats to make sure everything was running at 100%

A few people have asked how to get the BEbox stats into MRTG so heres a link to my mrtg scripts. They are based on the original parse script here so props to the original authors.

Download

Almost done

Havent updated the blog in a while - been too busy playing on the arcade :)

The CPO came back from the printers and its fairly decent. Because its printed on vinyl there are one or two small creases which I need to fix but aside from that all the buttons are hooked in and the machine is very usable.

The replacement cold cathode from Amazon is much better and doesnt suffer the same overheating problems. Only remaining bits left are:

- new marquee
- box in the rear of the monitor (or replace with an LCD)
- clean up the side panel - one has a scratch which is quite visable

I'll grab some pics before too long...

CPO Update

Finally finished the CPO design and should get it back from the printers later this week. Rough paper mockup looks fairly decent:

Also had chance to clean and respray the metal control panel, looking much better now. New cold cathodes have also arrived so just testing they dont overheat before fitting to the cab.

Hoping that the cab is back together and mostly done by the end of this week :)

More aracde stuff

Started playing around with the GIMP this week working on a new CPO. First design isnt bad but im gonna make some changes. The good news is (almost) everything lines up.

 

Need to change the middle section now, I forgot about the bend :(

Props to PosteRazor for being able to print the design out to scale - makes life much easier.