Cutting of my nose.....

Having carefully read the new 2013 regulations from Greenpower the build of Projectile has to take a slightly different turn.

Firstly, under the changes there wont be any battery changes during races. This means the carefully planned and located battery access with the front-flip nose is now unnecessary....

.....Also in order to future proof the car as much as we can, we have noticed that Greenpower have already said that the 2014 regs will require 200mm of impact resistant foam in the nose of each car as opposed to the current 100mm.

This has caused us more of an issue since the front bulkhead which carries the front axle only has 100mm gap inside the carefully moulded nose of Projectile......gulp!

The only way we could see our way around this problem was some MAJOR surgery, in which we had to chop of the existing nose and sculpt a new longer one......



We decided to sculpt the entire nose from the squashy, impact resistant foam.

No mean feat I can tell you (and we only just had enough foam!) I'm more happy with the resulting look than I expected to be, I had worried about it looking a right dogs dinner, but not too horrible!!



I think I'll keep the battery 'hatch' just in case they decide to change the rules back....

I think the new profile certainly gives the car a more aggressive front end, although I'm uncertain how to paint it or cover it given that it is a) squishy and b) absorbent!

Out with the old...

 

 

And in with the new...

 

The National Finals....Wet and Jinxed...

And so to the National Finals...

We eventually qualified 20th on the grid of 75 cars and after a later than planned start to the day, left the school at 6.00am on October 13th, destination Goodwood.

Quickly through scrutineering, we enjoyed the full hour of practise laps, putting in some very promising times and data through our telemetry system.

At 1.00pm sharp, Lord March the owner of Goodwood, waved the flag to start our 4 hour race. We quickly settled into a steady pace, gradually making ground with some fine driving from all members of the team despite some horrific weather (horribly cold and very, very, very, wet!!).

All was well until Mr Stephenson (Headmaster) made his annual appearance and instantly jinxed us!!!!(this has happened before in previous years!).

As our final driver of the day (Liam Hazzard Lynch) began his long 1hour and 20minute stint on the last set of batteries of the day, he was pushed off by Reece.........and promptly rolled to a stop at the end of the pit lane!!!!!

On recovering the car it took 10 minutes to diagnose a sheared main power cable and a further 15 minutes of frantic work to fix it, leaving us out of the race for 25 minutes.....DISASTER!!!

Because of the lost time, Liam was able to push much harder than we would normally and he quickly began to regain places working his way from 42nd back up to 22nd before spectacularly spinning off at Woodcote corner twice and having to be pushed back onto the track by a marshal. Despite this setback, Liam valiantly struggled on through the frankly God-awful weather and managed to finish the race 32nd, tired, wet and a little disappointed!

On a slightly more positive note, having crunched the numbers post race, we have worked out that had we not suffered a 25 minute breakdown, we would have come approximately 12th.......promising!

Top Gear track excitement!

Been a while since the last update....sorry about that, the beginning of term is always very hectic indeed!!

On 29th September the team travelled to one of my favourite tracks, Dusfold park in Surrey, more commonly known as the BBC Top Gear track.....yes, the one that the Stig drives around!!!

Arriving nice and early, we quickly got through scrutineering and managed an hour's decent practise before the race.

Despite some very over enthusiastic marshals (very) who continually made driver changes far slower than they ought to have been, all of our drivers had a good race (bar a couple of spins as the Hammerhead bend was slippery) with the notable exception of Tash the Crash, who was unceremoniously side swiped off the track and onto the grass by another team!!

During our final driver change a quick visual inspection reassured us that no serious damage had been done and our car continued faultlessly, gradually gaining places right up to the flag placing us a very respectable 5th at the end of the race.