robzracing

This was not me obviously!

Now sold I'm afraid. Thanks guys.

Now £350! Need these gone to make space for an engine rebuild.

This is a complete kit for the main rear suspension components which we never got around to fitting to our track car. Supplied by Abbey Motorsport when they did the suspension and front poly bushes. Looking for £500 inc p&p (as long as you're in the UK)

Both very different cars to be honest (obviously!) the 350z is such a beautifully balanced car it's great to drive on track, but you are always aware of the weight of the car, especially under braking! The Clios are huge fun but a handful to drive quickly. Miles faster than the Nissan around the bends and probably a good 2 or 3 seconds a lap faster as a consequence. ( depending on the track) The clios are also much cheaper to run and repair too.

Looks good Mark. Is that the same brake upgrade as ours? Looking forward to watching your progress on this. Let us know when your testing at Brands.

Off to Newcastle (4.5 hours away!) to pick up another Clio on Thursday. We will now have a matching pair Not nearly as tidy or well specced as the other one but it comes with a trailer and was half the price, so a good starting point. Also a bonus that it's the same colour so body panels can be shared too. And this is the Nissan at the moment Sadly Alfies bumper didn't travel well...... Very disapointing and the courier is not making any claim easy unsurprisingly. Does anyone know whether with some gentle heat I might be able to ease that dent out? Any advice appreciated

A little overdue an update I think!! Our season went very well last year with a total of 12 track days and no mechanical issues. Our last visit to Brands last year at the end of October was the one and only time one of our guests put the 350Z backwards into the tyres and to be honest I think we got off lightly as the track was just about the most slippery I've seen it. Even I spun it once! Thanks to Alfie on here we have a new bumper on its way to us ready for our first event of 2014 So, since my last post we also aquired another car which we hope to race this season if the sponsors come on board. It's a championship winning sprint car but we'll be entering an endurance series with it. New livery just been done and this was it before It's far from standard mechanically, running ITBs, close ratio box and LSD putting out about 215bhp at 970kg laiden. So it's pretty quick and corners like nothing else, especially on slicks! Lots of plans for 2014 and the Nissan is due a trip to Abbey in the next few weeks for some routine maintenance. Hopefully it will be working even harder for its money this year. More updates as the preseason work begins.

If you still have it could you PM me a price for the rear bumper?

All sounds good. I did the brake upgrade last year, it makes a massive difference on track.

Another great write-up for Steve and Mark

Great write-up Steve. Hopefully we'll be there with you next season!

Time for a small update... The track days have been continuing and in the last 3 weeks the car's been to Brands, Bedford and Snetterton so it's seeing plenty of action. But now we've had a couple of dry days it has become clear that the standard brakes just aren't up to the job of constant heavy braking even with our ducting running from the front. At Bedford we could only get in 10-15 minute stints before the brakes gave up so our upgrade became a priority. Our bargain buy from Palmersport turned out not to be quite the bargain as the calipers were deemed to be scrap! At least we had the discs, carriers and hoses so still not a bad deal I guess. Brake Caliper Refurbs offered us a brand new set of Brembo F50s for £400 so we snapped them up and they finally arrived last week quite a bit bigger! but surprisingly not much heavier. Although the carrier is a separate component with these but ours are machined from Aluminium and are also pretty light . (forgot to weigh them though ) The swap took about 3 hours......... before ...and after and back on its wheels Need to get the pads bedded in before Brands on Friday and possibly another quick bleed through as the pedal travel feels a bit long. Lets hope they work!

Good day today Took a trip to Bedford Autodrome to see the chaps at Palmersport engineering division. 6 or 7 years ago they were running 350Zs in their driver experience days and for driver instruction, so we managed to buy an instructor pedal off them that they had lying around and Steve Page the manager up there had invited me up there if I wanted to discuss how it was installed. Well, he didn't need to ask twice and I shot up the A1 this morning. Kid in a sweet shop doesn't begin to describe it! Steve spent pretty much the whole morning with me. Guided tour of the facilities, a look at the brand new Formula 4 cars that they are just finishing ready for a new race series for 16-21 year olds. Awesome cars that are likely to kill off Formula Ford but takes a much closer line to F1 which will hopefully see some more British drivers in a few years time. And the zed lapping it up! So I had a couple of engineers going through the details of the pedal. Then they called the designer over who had developed the pedal and we had a good chat about how great the 350Z is. They all recon it was by far the best car they had there for instructing. And also the most reliable. Then Steve mentioned that he had a set of Nismo Brembo calipers and 2 piece discs lying around. So he fished them out. 355mm AP discs on custom bells. The calipers need a refurb but they are monsters!! And at £200 I couldn't say no. For another £100 he threw in some brand new Carbon composite pads for the front and rear! plus all the hoses and some spare bleed screws. If that's not the deal of the century I don't know what is. Just need to get some prices for the refurb now.

A few more modifications and improvements. Before we went to Brands last week I fitted a quick release boss to the steering wheel. We also have a larger steering wheel on the way as this one is so small (300mm). So we're going up to a 330mm. The boss brings the wheel forward by about 60mm too which feels better. Fortunately we all seem to prefer the wheel quite close and having it QR should help should any of our sponsors need a little more space to climb in and out. You might also notice in the photos a new gearknob. It's a bit flash for a race car but the old one was so scruffy. This Richbrook one feels great (notice I'm avoiding inuendos ) We've also purchased an intercom system to make it easier to instruct when our sponsors drive the car Very easy to wire in, the only tricky bit is fitting the mics to the helmets which need to be glued to the outside on the open face helmets. (The full face ones are easy as it all fits inside) The mics have a hollow plastic base meaning that the double sided sticky pads that they supply to fix them have very little plastic to stick to. I could see them getting pulled off very easily so I've been attempting to improve them masked up and filled the voids with expanding foam made a template of the contour of the helmet transfered onto the mic all trimmed and filed and PVAd ready to take the double sided pads. We'll see if this works. Intercom installed. Just need to route the headphone leads up to a point where they can be easily plugged in to the helmets once people are sitting in the car. Finally, MSV have sold us an instructor brake pedal from one of their old 350Zs that they used to use at Bedford Autodrome. Seems like a nice bit of kit, with it's own slave cylinder and a modified cylinder for the main brake cylinder with a tee piece fitted. I'm going up to see Steve Page at Bedford on Wednesday who is in charge of their fleet of instructor cars to get some tips on installing it. These tips will likely get passed to Mark at Abbey as I don't think I'm going to have time to fit it myself before the car goes back to Abbey next week.