brillomaster

I doubt this will happen, both channel 4 and Sky have stated they do not wish to work with Clarkson.

true, but last film they made a point of mocking the exploding pen, so don't know what gadgets they'll put in if they cant even stomach some deadly stationery!

psssh, bring back the comedic elements - my fav bond is and always will be roger moore. sure some of his later films were a bit silly, but live and let die, the spy who loved me, for your eyes only and moonraker are all great films. we'll have to see how this film does, but so far none of DC's efforts have made my top ten bond films.

i have a cobra resonated, the only time it drones is if you go full throttle in 5th or 6th at 2,000 rpm. It also started worse, but got quieter as it was run in, so much so that I don't notice it anymore. but cruising on the motorway its fine, as you're above 2,000 rpm. and in addition it sounds great over 3,000rpm, and pops and crackles when its warm.

if i were to pick a favourite it would be hamilton. however, id be happy to let maldonado win the championship if there was lots of exciting racing along the way.

goodness no, I never let any scrupulous types hand wash my car. Its sainsburys automatic car wash for me, thanks

So, finally uploaded a video... dont have any fancy video editing software, so this is just raw footage... and the camera was mounted a bit low so you get more of the dash than the track ahead, but you get the idea... I'm following a megane for the first few laps, and then at 7:10 a caterham overtakes and i follow him for a little while. Generally keeping up too until we get to the faster sweeping corners, when i start getting hampered with understeer, certainly using all of the exit on some corners! But car sounds great with the hole in the exhaust, and not a bad car for £775

you wouldnt be the only person to go straight on at the back chicane chris - once the rain started falling our braking points moved dramatically since the fronts were just sliding! had to abort across the grass.

Alrighty, write up for the day.... quite a relaxed start at 6am, car started first time which was good, no need to jump start. cruised on over to bedford for signing on, managed to blag one of the free garages so unpacked the car in the garage. Met up with Chris (Keyser) and Darren (Darren- as well, so shared the garage when necessary to get out the rain and wind. So on to the beemer, and the word of the day is (surprisingly) Understeer. Lots and lots of understeer. which as you can imagine was incredibly tedious. it was bad in the dry, atrocious in the wet. You would think that having 225s all round rather than running wider rears as we have had in the past and having budget tyres all round would be a recipe for skids, but no amount of stabbing at the throttle mid corner or trail braking could unstick the rear - and once it started understeering there was no other option than to back off, since the steering wheel became useless at that point, adding more lock just increased the volume of the tyres squealing. I think first upgrade will be some tyres (shock horror!) - at the moment the front tyres are made of trees and precious gems (Evergreen and Diamondback) and while thats eco friendly, i'd rather they were made of decent rubber. and then as Darren says, geometry adjustments might be in order - we've got plenty of negative camber on the front (possibly too much, although i didnt think that was possible) but strongly suspect the wheels are toeing in a lot - car just does not want to turn, and the rear is glued to the road. some toe out on the front might be in order to get it to turn properly! you can just about drive around it with a decent slow in, late apex approach and gently feeding in the power, but get greedy with the throttle on the exit and it'll run wide. Looks like the best option for us with the wheels not fitting will be 15mm spacers, which also modify the hubs so we can run normal 3 series wheels - the extra track width will help with handling, and then hopefully we can run the preferred 245 front 255 rear tyres we want. One other small query - does anyone have an arch roller we can borrow? if we're adding width and wide tyres on a lowered car, we strongly suspect we'll need to roll the arches to get the clearance. Elsewhere, shakedown was entirely successful - engine was strong and smooth, so much so that it was hard to tell when you hit the limiter! Ken noticed a drop in power compared to the old 330ci we had, but in fairness i was happy with it - we were still pulling 110mph down the back straight, which is plenty. managed to see off most mx5s and caterhams during the course of the day. The odd M3 would pull away from us on the straights, but thats to be expected really. Plus we have the option of swapping the inlet manifold which frees up around 30hp and is relatively straightforward to do. Brakes held up surprisingly well as well - pedal would just start to go a bit long after 5 quick laps, but no pad fade - and just about 4pm the rears started grumbling, i think they now need iminent replacement, was making a horrible metal on metal noise on the way home. But once we have brakes and tyres on, she'll be a good cheap car - the lowering springs did a fine job of keeping things level through corners. I do have a video which i'll post a link to when i upload it - unfortunately quality isnt brilliant - need a go pro really. Great to see Darren and Chris in their respective machines and glad that Wendy got a couple of sessions in - always keen for more trackday drivers! Hopefully next trackday will be cadwell park at the end of april if i can convince Ken that the weather will be ok, but will sort brakes before then.

hmmm so just went to do some prep for tomorrow, air in tyres, fuel in tank, that sort of thing - and battery was flat as a pancake was fine leaving it for a week when i bought it, so it must have developed a drain on the battery somewhere. When driving it the 'boot open' warning light is on, even though the boot is very much closed and locked (dodgy bmw wiring harness splits and breaks, common fault) so i suspect that when its locked it still thinks the boot is open, and the boot light is draining the battery. So might be a bit late tomorrow if the car needs a jump start again! Wendy, just sent you a PM about tomorrow - see you at lunchtime. Can also look out for a bright orange Radical, since Chris has signed on as well! Weather looks a bit iffy... dry start, but then rain expected around lunchtime, then sunny intervals in the afternoon. hopefully if it does rain it'll be at lunch, and then a bit of sun and breeze will dry it out again.

If you're really a man's man, you wouldn't even ask the question. Just keep driving and see if something breaks. ahem this is a bad idea!

Oh and Wendy, you're more than welcome to drive a few laps if you came along, £20 for another driver on the day if you fancied coming over in the afternoon.

Looking forward to it already- hopefully it'll be dry! Will get some vids in the afternoon.

you'd be more than welcome to come along! its with MSV trackdays if you fancy it.

Well we could buy some 15 mm spacers/ hub adapters, could be an idea. Then we can carry on running normal 3 series wheels. Yeah the harnesses should ideally be mounted level, but cost and ease of using the standard rear belt bolts dictated this setup, its not too far out of recommendation. And yes I think we do have the video somewhere, will see if we can dig it out not a big shunt, but enough to write of a 400 quid car (plus we wanted a new one!)

I can't stand deloreans. Slow, not particularly good looking and unpainted. If it weren't for a certain movie tie in they'd be consigned to the scrapheap.

Hmm so wheel balancing hasn't fixed the steering wheel shudder... Gonna have to get it up on a ramp and check for play in the steering rack - suppose it could be possible there is some play somewhere having done 177,000 miles!

haha briefly! but for us its the perfect package - big enough for me to be able to drive comfortably to and from tracks with all our spares and tools in, great bmw 3 series rwd lairiness and straight-six soundtrack, nearly 200 bhp, plus they're cheap cheap cheap, with plenty of spare parts and tuning options available. only other cars you can get for less than a grand would be an MX5 (too small and slow unless you turbocharge it) or an MR2 (too old, can have twitchy handling). but we find that a 3 series with brakes and suspension upgrades is already faster than a lot of things on track, and with some decent tyres it'll corner well as well.

think i've worked out the wheel issue... my guess is someone put hubs from a BMW E39 5 series on, which has a centre bore of 74.1mm, whereas usual bmw 3 series centre bore is 72.6mm. might need to get some adaptors so we can run the wheels we want to, or alternatively buy a set of 5 series alloys!

havent done any in wales as yet - pembrey and llandow are a bit far away.... have considered going to anglesey but thats a good 3 hours as well!

Right, been meaning to start a thread on here for some time about our track car antics, but finally got around to doing it... so, as most of you will know, this isnt our first track car... the first was a dark green BMW e36 328, which we had for £410 off ebay. Lasted 12 trackdays until we had an unfortunate coming together with a wall at Rockingham. So, scrapped that one, and bought a E46 330ci for £1030. which lasted 5 and a half trackdays until we ran the oil dry, and lunched the engine. got it towed home and sold it on ebay, got £530 which was pretty good going! So, that takes us to track car number three - this time its a BMW E46 328i saloon, bought for the sum of £775 She's done 177,000 miles, but wouldnt be able to tell... the engine is strong and quiet, the gearbox is good, clutch is light, brakes are strong. As you can see its also been lowered a fair way, however when i bought it i wast sure if it was lowered on springs or full coilovers (hoping for coilovers). and already running on 18" wheels, plus the interior has poverty spec manually adjustable cloth seats, rather than the heavier electric leather seats. The car had 5 small niggles when we bought it, which were: front right had a slow puncture steering wheel shakes a bit at 65mph - suspect wheel imbalance exhaust back box has a hole in it throttle pedal is quite sticky and stiff seats were damp from being steam cleaned nothing major to worry about - just needed to air the car out and swap on some old wheels. So, onto the track readiness - nothing too serious as at this stage, if the car is a dud on track we'll need to put all the interior back in to sell it again. So easy stuff came out - rear seats, spare wheel and some boot trim, and thats it for now. just enough to put in our harnesses: unfortunately these things are never straightforward - managed to cross thread one of the front seat bolts immediately after taking it out and trying to put it back in again - most annoying. how can a bolt immediately cross thread? bmw must have made the thread out of cheese, clearly. the other straightforward mod was swapping in my steering wheel - the old wheel had an airbag, but it wasnt connected, didnt even have any connectors on (!) so that was an easy swap. last bit of prep was in the engine bay - first off, top up the oil and the water (clever idea to check the oil... ) and last mod is a great free one you can do to bmw E46s - the three nuts at the top of the front struts are in slotted holes, so you can loosen the nuts, move the struts inward and retighten, and get instant negative camber with no effect on toe. from far left to far right it adds about -1 degree. since the previous owner had lowered the car, he'd moved the struts all the way out to try and correct the camber drop from lowering - however since we're running purely as a track car, i moved them all the way in . front wheels now have very noticeable camber, should be good for front end grip (at the expense of tyre wear when driving to the track). unfortunately no coilovers, just lowering springs. but better than standard. Annoyingly the wheels we kept from the 330ci dont fit on the 328i! they're identical on width, diameter, offset, bolt diameter... but not wheel bore (!) - the 330ci wheel bores are a couple of mm smaller than the 328i wheels . so going to have to flog them since they're worthless to us now, and ideally find a set that fit, or just run 8" front and rear - or maybe find a set of staggered 8" fronts, 9" rears, so we can run 245 front 255 rears, at the moment it will have to be 245s all round, which might make the car a bit oversteery, especially with so much front camber. So thats that for now - once we know for sure that car is good on track then i'll do a full interior strip from the front seats back, then we'll look to get some decent tyres, and decent brake pads - the car currently has drilled discs and a good amount of brake pad material, but i dont trust cheap drilled discs on track in case they crack, so would replace with solid discs and yellowstuff pads, along with a rebleed - our preferred set up. If anyone is interested, our first shakedown session is next saturday, 28th March at the slightly amended Bedford Autodrome. Booking through MSV Trackdays, if anyone wants to join us. after that I hope to do one a month, over the summer i've seen weekend dates at rockingham, donnington, croft, cadwell... all excellent tracks! Will try and keep this posted updated with upgrades as and when they go on, and this is also where trackday videos will go

we're hopefully going next weekend, the 28th... they've slightly revised one of the corners, but if its your first time there it wont matter as you wouldn't know where it was different! enjoy it, i'll be a good track for a supercharged zed.

useful also to stop shopping and anything else rolling round the entire boot, but again, who goes shopping in the zed? that's what the girlfriends car is for, she can get the shopping trolley door dings! I also hear it reduces some of the road noise from inside the boot.

I think they should do what Have I Got News For You started doing a while back, and have guest presenters. although Alan Patridge would be pretty funny - although I think just Steve Coogan as himself would be good.

hahah that is a terrible stig costume, it looks like the helmet is made of cardboard! But fair play to Tanks-alot.co.uk, great national advertising!