Charlie Brown's NC

by **Charlie Brown** » Fri Apr 16, 2010 11:00 am

Back from Natmeet. We had a blast. Over 5,000 kilometres travelled and 499 photos taken.

Many thanks to the SA Club for the wonderful job they did.

Here’s a couple of shots “On the Beach”

A trio of Galaxy Greys To bad I couldn't get the woman to move in the background. :roll:

And not to be left out, a Winning blue.

I had a great time on the Willungah Hillclimb which was far steeper than any of the photos or video’s I saw before arriving there.

Here a shot borrowed from Andrew’s (MX-5 SP) gallery, of the “straight” section of the track, which when looking at my in-car video (will post later), showed I was at 6,900rpm in 3rd or around 125kph.

I managed to set my FTD on the first run up the hill and this put me in 2nd place overall after the first run, behind the SA hillclimb champion in a SP. To say I was surprised was an understatement as it was only my second run up the hill, the first being a reccie the day before. Plenty of spots to make up time in the following runs, even with just the road tyres onboard, but poor gear changes and experimenting with hanging onto second gear and bouncing off the rev limiter put paid to that.

Over all I ended up winning the modified 1850 -2000 class and took out the most consistent trophy, so the newly installed Teins must have worked.

by **JBT** » Fri Apr 16, 2010 12:07 pm

Over all I ended up winning the modified 1850 -2000 class and took out the most consistent trophy, so the newly installed Teins must have worked.

I think your driving might have had something to do with it :wink:

. I was happy with a "daylight" second place in the class. :oops:

I found approaching that corner and others at those sorts of speeds facing advisory speed signs "significantly" lower to be just a tad unsettling :shock:

. Very difficult to get the speedo out of the tacho scan - should have covered it. Then there were the silly things happening in my head with being on the wrong side of the single line on blind right handers. Gee I enjoyed it though. :mrgreen:

by **Charlie Brown** » Mon Apr 19, 2010 9:46 am

Here's my first timed run up the Willunga Hill.

We [Peter (Monte5), Keith (KRM) and Dave (Speedy)] saw it once the day before and it was hard to memorise all the corners as there were so many. The last section gets pretty tight with a quick bit of opposite lock as the car comes over the crown of the road through a tight right hander leading into a tight left.

Part way up the pin hole camera slips to one side. Also the writting to Youtube is a bit choppy in some sections, sorry about that.

If you check the tacho you can see in third gear it almost makes 7,000 rpm which equates to 130kph.

by **Hammer** » Mon Apr 19, 2010 11:10 am

Nice work.

Good catch (of opposite lock) at the tight corner near the end. I bet that raised your heartbeat a bit. :lol:

by **CoffeeBoss** » Thu Apr 22, 2010 10:55 am

Was thinking the same Alan!

Great video Phil, you should take this show on the road. Charlie Brown, challenges allcomers. Coming to a town near you

We need to get your NC fitted up with some appropriate Initial D stickers. :lol:

by **Arty** » Thu Apr 22, 2010 5:31 pm

Charlie Brown wrote:Back from Natmeet. We had a blast. Over 5,000 kilometres travelled and 499 photos taken.

Many thanks to the SA Club for the wonderful job they did.

Here’s a couple of shots “On the Beach”

A trio of Galaxy Greys To bad I couldn't get the woman to move in the background.

Hey Charlie Brown you just had to politely ask her and the other people to move, only takes a minute !!! :mrgreen:

by **Hammer** » Thu Apr 22, 2010 5:47 pm

Photoshop is your friend.

by **Charlie Brown** » Fri Apr 23, 2010 11:02 am

Arty wrote:Hey Charlie Brown you just had to politely ask her and the other people to move, only takes a minute !!!

Yep we could have but she was enjoying the beach and we didn't want to spoil it for her. I don't have Photoshop but at the time figured that if the photos turned out alright I could learn to remove anything unwanted from the shot.

Hammer wrote:Nice work.

Good catch (of opposite lock) at the tight corner near the end. I bet that raised your heartbeat a bit.

Keith and myself had talked about a number of corners after that happened on our reccie a couple of days before, so I was expecting it to happen. The only thing I didn't know was how far it would step out at the speed I was doing or what effect it would have on the entry for the next left hander.

I now know why Jim Richard's recommends his method of driving the centre line for public road rallys. It takes out the unweighting effect on the wheels as you cross the crown of the road.

by **Charlie Brown** » Fri Jun 11, 2010 3:58 pm

A new milestone was reached on Tuesday.

100,000 kilometres of virtually trouble free motoring and racing since October 2005.

Roll on 200,000 k. :mrgreen:

by **CoffeeBoss** » Fri Jun 11, 2010 4:57 pm

Passed 78'000kms last week... I'm catching you on my odo at least!!

Well done - did you do the 100km/h thing? I didn't even know about it. Apparently it's a tradition in MX5 circles, that one must be doing 100km/h when they pass 10'000kms in order to ensure the next 100'000km/h is as trouble free as the last.

So from that, we can only conclude that you must be doing 200km/h when you reach the next hundred thousand milestone!

And therefore, you cannot expect to reach 400'000kms without a rebuild.

Seems like pretty sound reasoning to me :lol:

by **Charlie Brown** » Fri Jun 11, 2010 5:12 pm

Didn't know about the 100kph thing.

Probably doing 70kph on Grand Pde Brighton.

I did break the 200kph barrier at Phillip Island a few years ago.

I also learnt not to jump on the brakes at that speed. The rear gets very light.

by **Charlie Brown** » Tue Jun 22, 2010 9:58 am

Big day at Wakefield for the Club’s 20th Anniversary track day yesterday. Perfect conditions, being cool and dry all day and good rubber on the track from a Supersprint meeting the day before meant that most bettered their previous best times.

I managed to get a 1:10.83 , which I’m absolutely wrapped about.

It’s a time that if you’d asked me 2 years ago if it was possible to get into the 1:10s in a daily drive NC I would have said no, that’s something dreams are made of.

The day was cold to start with and I found it quite slippery for the first two laps. Getting the tyres warm took longer than normal. The other thing I found was that the car “jumped” up and down coming out of the fish hook. It was like the old axel tramp of days gone by with the car struggling for traction. The back straight it was all over the places, bouncing of the tops of the bumps in the road.

I had the shocks set to the same hardness as I had run previously at Eastern Creek but obviously Wakefield has a lot of bumps that I didn’t realise when I ran the stock shocks. I backed the shocks off a few clicks for the next run and that almost solved the problem. Another click came off for the third run and with this set up managed the 1:10 time.

Mark Hellman broke into the 1:09s :mrgreen:

in his modified NB, a fantastic effort and something he wanted to do before fitting a turbo but had not been able to do despite many attempts. Congratulations to everyone else who set PBs and new class records on the day. I think it may be some time before we see conditions like this again, but who cares? The runs are now on the board for others to catch.