Factory Visits to GD and EDA

Thursday 27th March 2014

After passing IVA, Andy said to me that I needed to put about 500 miles on the clock and then bring it back to the factory to be set up properly once everything had time to settle down.

I was keen to get this done as I haven't been entirely happy with the handling up til now, particularly under powerful acceleration as the car seemed quite 'twitchy' and a bit like a high power front wheel drive car with a bad dose of torque steer.

I had discussed this with Andy and he was confident this would be resolved quite easily... and as usual he was right!!!!

Having had several consecutive days of early Spring sunshine, it was no surprise that on the day of the factory visit the forecast was horrible!!! So, arriving at the factory with the car on the new Brian James Race Shuttle and one eye on the weather, the trailer was unloaded and Andy was straight out with his various gauges and spirit levels.

First off damping was adjusted slightly on the front suspension. Then the rear alignment was adjusted, adding a fair bit of toe in. Next, rear ride height was dropped about 10mm and damping adjusted. The final tweak was then to set the rear camber angles correctly as there was a quite a bit of variation between left and right wheels.

Having made these adjustments, it was off up the road with Andy at the wheel. As a passenger, the car seemed stable and responsive through the various bends and roundabouts and was pulling up in a straight line under braking.

Andy then asked me to drive the car to see how it compared. Literally a mile up the road I could tell that the changes had make a huge difference. The car now went in the direction it was pointed, it didn't twitch under acceleration and it didn't follow the camber of the undulating roads as it had previously.

We got back to the factory just before the heavens opened and loaded the car back on to the shuttle for the short ride up to EDA in Castleford to have the carb set up. Ken rang just as I was leaving to say he had been called away to Donington, but 'Dyno Den' his colleague would be there to sort out the carb issues I had been experiencing.

Arriving at EDA, Denis decided to change the plugs and increase the plug gap to .040" from .025" before looking at the carb. This didn't seem to make too much difference so the carb was swapped for a brand new one. Float levels were checked and adjusted and vacuum was set up. Several tweaks later I headed back home hoping that the slow running problems were now a thing of the past - unfortunately I am still getting lumpy tick over and uneven performance sub 2000rpm particularly when coasting. A further trip back to Ken is required.