Pan Delta Super Racing Festival Spring Race

[fieldl]

Last weekend was the start of my 2014 race season in the Atom.
I've already run in the Wakefield 300 down in Australia a month ago with a friend in their Peugeot 205 GTi so was looking forward to getting out in the Atom.

Friday saw a good practice and ended up in me beating my personal best taking it down to 1:50.27 still barely any time stopping me breaking the sub 1:50 barrier.

Qualifying on Saturday morning was a different story, on my out lap I couldn't get 4th gear and it progressively got worse and stopped shifting up and down.  I set a time in 3rd gear at 1:56 and pulled into the pits.  At least I qualified even if it was 10th on the grid.  We stripped the gearbox down with it still in the car and could see the dog's were completely shot and there was no way I'd get out for Race 1 later that day.

Saturday night was spent with the team cutting the dogs by hand to square them off to get them to bite.  The box was then put back together with some confidence I'd at least be able to start.

It was decided that I would use the clutch throughout the race to try and lower the stress on the freshly cut gears not ideal but as one of the race engineers said "this is how we used to do it before we had machines" fair enough I guess.  Lacking some essential information on torque settings it was decided that we'd use the 'big f*cking gun' and tighten it hard.

So I started the race from the back of the grid having not started race 1, kind of fortunately a good number of other cars had failed to start so I was 15th out of 16, somewhat lower than our usual grid size and what a grid it was we had a Ferrari 458 GT3, C63 AMG V8 Superstar, Caterham R500, Radical SR1 along with the usual field of Evo's, Suburu's and other assorted eclectic race cars including a 2.3l Supercharged Ginetta G20.

Anyway here's the video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=65exAvggHb8&feature=youtu.be

Some good racing until lap 5 when the dogs decided to give up, I ended up driving round in 3rd gear about 5 seconds off my usual pace but had built up enough of a lead to still finish 3rd in class and 8th overall.

Happy enough with that given I seriously doubted I'd even finish.

So despite big imminent bills from Quaife what actually caused this issue in the first place....
The gear selector cable from selector runs through the passenger compartment over the fuel tank and then does a big loop around to the back of the gearbox.  Not ideal and when it gets hot it all moves and flexes, then I can't get a gear and find false neutrals or worse fail to lock in gear with it then slipping out and over-revving the engine.  This is going to be redesigned very soon!

[fieldl]

[AtomMadStew]

Thermal wrap the cable & reroute the cable methinks.
Sounds like a very competitive car.
Hope you get all the niggles sorted
Stew

[Toilet Duck]

Good write up and exciting video, hope you get this resolved before your next outing 

[quote="fieldl"]We stripped the gearbox down with it still in the car
[/quote]

As an aside, how did you manage to strip the gearbox in situ? I thought the engine/box had to come out before they could be split (i.e. for a clutch change)? Unless your sequential box makes it easier (although I seem to recall from one of your earlier threads that you use the "standard" gear box casing, its just the internals that are different?).

Cheers

[benyeats]

[quote="Toilet Duck"]
Good write up and exciting video, hope you get this resolved before your next outing 

[quote="fieldl"]We stripped the gearbox down with it still in the car
[/quote]

As an aside, how did you manage to strip the gearbox in situ? I thought the engine/box had to come out before they could be split (i.e. for a clutch change)? Unless your sequential box makes it easier (although I seem to recall from one of your earlier threads that you use the "standard" gear box casing, its just the internals that are different?).

Cheers
[/quote]

I suspect it is possible if you actually split the box, e.g. remove housing, remove gears, remove bell housing but not as a complete box removal.  For changing a clutch removing the engine as well is probably easier.

Certainly on my Atom 1 I removed the gearbox in this way (I wanted to be inside the gearbox anyway for LSD fitting purposes.)

Ben

[fieldl]

Benny is pretty much spot on the end of the gearbox casing is removable so you can get at the gearset.  You certainly cannot get to the clutch and if you have to split the box from the engine it's an engine out job.  You can get to the gears though and remove all of them and the selection rods. 

I'm going to get rid of the cable and move to a fixed rod the alternative is to put some sort of bellcrank on the gearbox and do it in reverse.  This will fix the problem even if I need to put a pivot on the gear lever to change the direction.

[benyeats]

[quote="fieldl"]
Benny is pretty much spot on the end of the gearbox casing is removable so you can get at the gearset.  You certainly cannot get to the clutch and if you have to split the box from the engine it's an engine out job.  You can get to the gears though and remove all of them and the selection rods. 

I'm going to get rid of the cable and move to a fixed rod the alternative is to put some sort of bellcrank on the gearbox and do it in reverse.  This will fix the problem even if I need to put a pivot on the gear lever to change the direction.
[/quote]

You can remove the rest of the gearbox once the gearset is out but don't recommend doing it that way unless you need to open the gearbox anyway.......

[Toilet Duck]

Cheers for all the info. For a brief moment I thought someone had discovered a way to cut down the cost/time of a clutch change by doing away the need to remove the engine and box