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Loton Park, May 10th 2003
My first hillclimb in the Fiesta, Loton Park is an incredible venue. The grippy tarmac track runs through a thick wood, up the side of a really steep hill, and has a mixture of slow 2nd gear corners, and very fast 4th gear uphill straights. Some of the hills have blind brows, followed by really tight turns, but a couple of runs and you soon know which way the track turns. Still phenomenally difficult, but very rewarding when you get to the top without falling off or generally fowling up. Prior to the event I discovered that the throttle was only opening about 90%, due to slack in the cable when closed. I adjusted this slack out, and reset the throttle stops, and it is awesome now when I give the car full throttle. I removed the rear strut brace from the car to save weight. I don't think it actually did a lot anyway. I also replaced the headlamps with printed laminated images of lights, taken using the digital camera. They're so realistic, no one was spotting that they were fake. Saved about 2 Kgs altogether. The new launch control sensor is mounted on the rear wheel, but I hadn't completed the wiring for this event so was just relying on throttle control to get the car off the line quickly.
Times were as follows:
73.98s, 64ft 2.77s, Triangle 29.35s 1st practice
80.05s, 64ft 3.50s, Triangle 32.11s 2nd practice(wet)
68.25s, 64ft 2.75s, Triangle 26.63s 1st timed
The quickest run put me in to 1st in class.
No gear selection problems on this event. A sure but steady approach appears to be paying off. Tyre pressures were 21psi all round, running on Yokohama A032R's.
Unfortunately the datalogger reported that it contained corrupted data so I was unable to download any of my three runs at Loton Park
Here is a PDF file with the report that appeared in Nottingham Sports Car Clubs 'Spinoff' magazine, and Loughborough Car Clubs 'Backfire' magazine.
Photographs below were taken using a Kodak DX3600 digital camera
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