First race of the season is only few days away. I’ve been going over my car and make sure that all the nuts and bolts that we loosen during the off season are tighten again. This includes the nuts behind the wheel. We had very little chance to test, this off season. It is a combination of bad weather and an injury I got from a snowboarding accident on Christmas day. 8 weeks later, and after numerous physical therapy, I’m still nursing my left shoulder. This hasn’t stopped me to visit local indoor kart facility to try to keep myself sharp.

So, what have we been doing to the car during the off-season? We’ve learned a lot last year and obviously we tried to implement what we learned and hope to see it bears some results in 2010 racing season.

Firstly, we made some improvements to our engine mounts. The reason is because our new header, will not clear the existing Hasport mount. With the help of Hasport, we modify a few Hasport off-the-shelf mounts so our new header fits well. In addition we were able to shed about 10 lbs.

In engine department, we changed the header, intake manifold, air intake box and lots and lots of dyno tuning trying to extract as much power as we can.

Of course we do not neglect the chassis. We went over and made improvements to our suspension and we needed to make the car lighter if we want to be competitive in Honda Challenge H1. We are way overweight with a minimum weight of 2770 lbs, compared to allowable 2450 lbs + 75 lbs (remote canister damper), + 30 lbs (cage) = 2,555 lbs. With a lot of work, we were able to lower the minimum weight to 2725 lbs.

Few days ago, the crew and I get to do final preparation and play with our newest tool, geometry plates! I saw this first used by a few ALMS teams. Obviously theirs, looks much better and much more expensive, but ours works as well. This tool enable us to do alignment more accurate and quicker. All the arms and any adjustment can be reached without crawling under the car or have to remove wheels or other parts.

All of this changes are still within the rule of Honda Challenge H1 class.  While we are able to extract more power, everyone else will be able do the same, and we are still at a disadvantage being the heaviest chassis with 170 lbs over the minimum weight. Hopefully by doing a lot of development, we can stay ahead of the curve, thus the competition.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 23rd, 2010 at 10:11 am and is filed under Andrie's blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.