I have a confession to make… I’ve never really been into drag racing, until recently I’d hadn’t actually seen drag racing in person until I went along to Santa Pod to lend a hand with the 1320 Mini crew. It doesn’t mean I’ve not watched a lot of drag racing
Continue readingMSV Trackdays – Snetterton 300 – April 2017
I’d put quite a lot of thought into deciding when I’d start my track day season in 2017, although there are days in February/March where the weather is “good” generally track temperatures are low meaning the tyres simply don’t work well enough. In my mind late April seemed to be a
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Home Brew Data Logger
My first project for 2017 is to build a data logger for use on track days, over the last couple of years I’ve used a Garmin ViRB Elite camera that provides data via GPS and a built in accelerometer. Although it does provide some basic timing/speed data for comparison it
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R56 GP 2 Diffuser
With the track day season over for another year for all but the bravest (or possibly foolish) drivers I’ve started to think about jobs to be done before the spring comes. With the power upgrades now done I’m looking at making the car quicker through the corners. My plan was
Continue readingBedford GT – October 2016
After my last track day at Snetterton I headed back to 1320 MINI for a session on the rollers to see if we could get to the bottom of the boost control problems. With a few small changes and the car making healthy power using full boost (slightly over 400hp
Continue readingSnetterton 300 – September 2016
With the build taking a lot longer than anticipated I’d lost count of the number of plans I’d had for a shakedown trackday. Early in the summer I was optimistic that I’d make the Destination Nurburgring track day (DN16) at the end of September but driving all the way to
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Race Technology DASH4PRO
One of the decisions I made early on in the build was that I wanted a set of gauges or a dash that would allow me to monitor most of the critical parameters on the car: Oil Pressure Oil Temperature Water Temperature Air Fuel Ratio Boost Pressure Intake Temperature I decided to
Continue readingJuly Update
I’ve not posted an update for a number of months and those of you who have been following the earlier posts are probably thinking the car has been running for a number of months and I’ve not posted because I’ve been enjoying it too much! I wish this was the
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R53 Turbo Build – Part Four (It’s alive!)
With all of the electrical work done it was time to move onto assembling all of the parts to actually have the turbo mounted on the car! The next job was to test fit the cooling package (radiator, fan and intercooler) from proalloy.co.uk although not a cheap solution (£1500 all
Continue readingR53 Turbo Build – Part Three (Wiring, Wiring and More Wiring)
One of the major benefits of using a standalone ECU (aside from actually being able to tune the car properly and decent throttle response!) is that the standalone ECUs usually support additional inputs/outputs above and beyond those offered in the stock configuration. The ViPEC ECU uses an extension loom that
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