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Björkvik 5-6/6-2004 Since I had all my focus at the competition and the car my camera sort of never left my pocket during the whole event. Therefore its only two images from the actual event. One was published in the magazine Bilsport, and the other I borrowed from Markus Ek's site www.mek.nu The remaining images are from different occations but without connection to the actual event. Below is the story from the weekend 4-6 June: It seemed hard to get ready in time for the race, but even though it seemed hard, I did manage to both complete the car and to get my name on the list of participants. Everything looked fine and I changed to bigger injectors one week before the race. My biggest concern was to see if the fuel pump would manage or not. As usual I was caught up in the garage until 04:00 the night before race fixing all those little details you think yore "going to fix later". At 06:00 everyone (Me, Elmer, Nalle and his girlfriend) met up at the local Shell station for a fast breakfast. Saturday however was just a day for qualifying rounds so I wasn't too concerned about getting only two hours of sleep. The track Björkvik is situated in Nyköping, and Nyköping is far known all over Sweden for there extremely pointy police force when it comes to speedticketing. For that reason we drove down the 130 Km at ease. On the way to the track the car felt pretty ok, and I felt that it would probably go reasonably fast on the track but as we all know there is a great difference between accelerating on the highway compared to the track. My first round out I ran 13,4s. I cant say I was too pleased with that and I really felt something was missing horsepower wise. However I got 1,8s in 60ft-time so I knew the track was good enough to run faster. For the second run I raised the boost to 29 PSI and then I definitely got more power at low and mid revs but at top revs the car still felt a bit tired. I ran 13,0 (see the timeslip at top) with a 60ft at 2,2s. For the third qualifying run I lowered the boost to around 25 PSI and changed fuel pump. The fist two runs was with an Audi S2 pump, but for the third I used a Bosch K-jet fuel pump. The K-Jet pump was much more willing to give fuel than the Audi so it basically pored fuel from my exhaust pipe at idle. At mid revs and boost the car wouldn't run well at all. After my third run the qualifying was over and no one was allowed to use the track for the rest of the evening, so I took the car out on the highway in desperation to get the car to rev over 6000 rpm. Unfortunately nothing seemed to help, and the problem was that I got way too much fuel with the new pump. The solution would probably be to install a linear fuel pressure regulator, instead of the rising rate 1,4:1 I had on. After making some phone calls I discovered that a friend of mine that has his own speedshop called Speedworks had a linear FPR in his shop. The only problem was that it was Saturday evening and he and his girlfriend had some friends over for dinner and beer... ...however that didn't stop us, so we went up the 130 km to Stockholm and to his apartment. Picked him up and drove him to his shop. Got an OBX linear FPR and then drove him back to his dinner party. His girlfriend was very amused over her boyfriends nice friends such as my self *not*. After some good 5 hours sleep at home we went back to the track. Mounted the new FPR just to discover that it was broken. It did'nt regulate the pressure at all. 71 PSI was max and min fuel pressure that it would regulate to. Vacuum or boost, 71 PSI was what I got. With that one in the bin and the rising rate back on we put the car on a dyno that a nice guy let us use for free at the track. After 45 minutes on the dyno with me desperate trying to get less fuel at top, less boost, more boost, different sparkplugs, and so on, it was time to line up. With the car still misfiring heavily above 6000 rpm, I lined up against a Saab 900 that ran mid 11-passes all qualifying rounds, so I was going to loose. The question was only by how much. Instead of just leaving walk over I decided to practice 60ft's. After such a long nights sleep I felt more focused than I usually feel at a race day. I bet I had a stunning reaction-time and the 60 ft would probably have ben very good too if I had gotten the gearbox to hold on. I left stage and rolled around 1 ft until it was the firemen's job to get my car off the track. At first I got surprised, but later on I couldn't blame the box. That old box held on for the hole season 2002 with a winding noise from one of the synchros and around ten 12sec passes with MT's. By the way, that was my first gearbox I've ever ruined! Those of you that has more experience from destroying N12 gearboxes probably already know but for those who don't know I can tell that it was the diff that made a hole in the gearbox chassis. I put a new box in the car on the following tuesday. With a broken gearbox 130 km's from home I kind of regretted that I drove it down as a street car. Luckily it broke down so early in the day so after some asking around we got to borrow Brillko's VW transporter. The only problem was that after getting home with the Wok, we had to turn straight back to the track with the transporter so Brillko could get his Pontiac Lemans home too. In normal case that would have been a pretty normal request, but some stupid *** "accidentally" put a gearbox from a complete different type of vehicle in the transporter so its top speed was 80 km/h in theory. That meant since it was a diesel engine that we were not allowed to drive faster than 75 km/h (45 mph). It took me 2 hours to get the 130 km's home, 30 minutes to unload and 2 hours to get back to the track (which, by the way, had closed when we got back so Brillko had to wait outside the track area) Even if the transporter was slow as I dont even know what to relate to, it was better than to try and tow the Wok home, so even if it might sound as if I was disappointed in the transporter I'm very grateful to Brillko and his team that they let us borrow their transporter. I think that was what I had to tell from the SDC premiere at Björkvik 5-6/6-2004. Two weeks from now I will run at SDC in Gothenburg. Thats 520 km's from Stockholm, so I hope I have a safer form of transportation than I had this time. Driving the Wok all the way is just not an option. Hopefully I will get the car to run allot better too. Since It has taken some time for me to translate all this text I have already ben to Gothenburg and it went better than Björkvik in several points. The transportation was solved permanently, I ran faster and I even got a price... -Wich place I got to will be reveled in next update. Stay tuned. /Bjorn 2004-05-22 |
2004-05-22
