Le Mans Classic 2014.

 

This year would see us return to Le Mans Classic to see if we could better our results than in previous years of 2012 and 2008. Once again we’d been placed in ‘plateau 3’ alongside 75 other cars. There was a total of 4; Aston Martin DB4GT’s entered including ours.

Scrutineering

For a change, scrutineering went well. The French officials don’t have a sense of humour and because of the language barrier you can’t exactly blag your way through it as you might do in this country. I’d corrected small things that others had been pulled up on; taping battery terminals, boot straps, wire locking fuel caps etc. Luckily we got through and had no time penalty’s as we had previously in 2012.

Qualifying

This took place on Friday evening at 7pm, it started to rain just before we went to the collecting area but because the track was still very warm from the daytime sun, the track was drying very quickly, it was still around 28 degrees in temperature. Adrian decided to go first to get a decent lap in whist it was still reasonably dry in case the rain got heavier and it turned into a wet session. Adrian did a out lap, 2 timed laps and an in lap…. his best time was a 5.02.55 which put us 2nd on the grid. Tom completed the same number of laps as Adrian but didn’t better Adrian’s time. We were actually 6 seconds slower than our fastest lap around the Lemans’ circuit that we’d set in 2012.

Night Practise

Prior to this practise the French scrutineers had assembled around our car and were inspecting our dynamo-alternator, others that had been caught with this type of alternator had received a 5 minute time penalty for each of our 3 races, it took them a long time to come to the conclusion that it was a alternator not a dynamo as it had been disguised with extra wire’s connected to the rear of it and the original voltage regulator dummy wired to look original. We pleaded ignorance and they believed that we didn’t realise it was a modern unit. They asked us to fit a dynamo and get it checked before we went back out on circuit. This was easier said than done….  We borrowed a dynamo from the team next to us in the awning as they’d taken a 5 min penalty and didn’t want to fit their dynamo, we made some spacers to use the existing brackets and sourced some longer bolts from our spares, we asked around to get the correct length fan belt as the pulley was much larger.

Once it was all bolted in place I then had to re-wire the car using the dummy voltage regulator and make everything work, it started to charge at 2500rpm so Tom was instructed to use headlights only and not to use the big spot lights that had been fitted for this event. We were nearly last into the collecting area, a scrutineer came over and checked prior to going out on the circuit, he gave us the all clear and Tom set off for the night session…..

A slow outlap was followed by 2 quick laps which put in P4 in this night session with a time of 5.23.77, at the end of lap 4 Tom pitted and it was clear that there was a problem as the water temp gauge was at 110 degrees and there was a massive misfire from the engine.

Once back at the awnings and after investigation we found that the head gasket had gone and was blowing between cylinders 4, 5 and 6. We had to retire the car as we needed a special head gasket that we didn’t carry in our spares package.

We’ll be back in 2016 to try and win our Plateau.

 

Event timing results;

http://peterautoracing.alkamelsystems.com/

 

 

 

 

 

More information on this event will appear soon.

Check back closer to the event date for an update.

Thank you for your interest in 22GT Racing.


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