By now it’s no secret that our little Fiesta ST had a little problem in the second VLN of 2016. But that’s not to say that we didn’t make progress or didn’t have an awesome weekend.
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So herein you’ll find a short report of the things we did, learnt and improved upon!
DN14 – Thursday Testing
Our race weekend really started on the Thursday, thanks to an entry on the latest Destination Nürburgring trackday. DN is one of the few events were it’s possible (with prior approval) to drive your racecar on slicks, and we were keen to get some spanner-twirling done on our Milltek/LiteBlox Fiesta. Why take a racecar to a trackday?
- You can pit every lap and change settings, then drive out again
- Unlimited track time means less ‘pressure’ on driving
- Safer track time than a timed qualifying session, less risk of GT3 ‘interaction’ 😉
By the end of the day we’d given a few taxi laps to lucky guests, and made significant improvements on the tuning of our Nitron suspension. The relationship of the high-speed and low-speed compression damping now seemed less confusing, and thanks to increasing the rear spring rates by nearly 40% we’d eliminated a lot of the understeer we found in VLN1.
SATURDAY – QUALIFYING
VLN2 was BUSY. Over 190 cars signed up for the race, and we were packed 6 and 7 cars to a single garage! Kjetil and the Manheller guys were fighting for every inch, inside the pit-box and in front of it too!
Of course, after the unexpectedly warm weather of the trackday, the Eifel snapped back to ‘normal’ and we went into the morning qualifying on a fully wet and quite cold track. Although Luke found the car a little too over-steery in the wet sections, you couldn’t deny that the Fiesta ST has some serious wet-weather pace! At some points in the 90-minute session we were as high as 65th out of 190th – in almost the smallest car on the grid!
When I jumped in to set my time, the track was still wet, but had a dry line through most sections. So I took slicks… and loved every minute of it! Starting my second timed lap, I saw this Cayman GT4 Clubsport emerge from pitlane on FULL RACING WETS… considering how dry it was, I thought he’d go straight back to the pits rather than trash €2000 of Michelin racing wet tyres.
But no, he chose the €2000 option, which also left the door open to a full-on fight with ‘my’ little Fiesta! Full video below:
The race started wet…
I’ll be honest, I wanted to start on slicks. When Sabine (Schmitz) and Derscheid (V4 experts, VLN champions, and local heroes) roll onto a wet grid with slick tyres, you take notice.
I’m not complaining too much, because we took the ‘safe option’ while the track was still quite wet. No point crashing the car because one guy feels a bit fruity!
Luke still pushed very hard to bring the Fiesta nearly half-way up the leaderboard! We swapped from wets to slicks after only a couple of laps, but we couldn’t change the wet suspension settings so easily (we’d softened the front axle a lot to help prevent the oversteer).
With the car wallowing so much, and struggling with traffic (other cars being on wrong tyres), Luke couldn’t repeat the 10m04s he’d set in qualifying (a new Fiesta record!) but there was no doubting his pace. At one point we were well inside the trophies of the 2.5 and 3.0 litre classes!
But then…
DISASTER
While the rest of Manheller Racing carried on (the SP6 BMW would eventually score 2nd in class!), Kjetil volunteered to begin the diagnosis, and *maybe* we could figure out a fix to drive over the line on 4-hours and score a ‘finish’ instead of a DNF.
But despite Kjetil’s unwavering will-to-win, that was not to be. The motor and turbo of our Fiesta was nothing scrap metal. We were out. 🙁
Monday – the Post-Mortum
Kjetil, not due to fly back to Oslo until Tuesday, bravely volunteered a full day on the spanners. Where he discovered our new-found speed, better set-up and drying conditions presented a new problem…
Yes, that’s all that was left of piston #1. Main bearings siezed and broken, two holes in the block, and clearly a lack of oil (and an excess of heat) on the bottom and top. With the other pistons and valves looking fat and happy, and REVO’s information pointing to a cool and rich mixture, it looks like our 1.4 lateral Gs were simply too much for the stock oil feeding system.
So from dawn ’til dusk, Kjetil worked through our car and even dropped the motor ready for Manheller to stick in a new one…
VLN3 IS ON!
DON’T WORRY! Manheller Racing picked up a new crated motor, and after some brief discussions with Revo, we have some new things to try. Including (but not limited to) an additional air-to-oil cooler for the motor, a transmission oil cooler, a new baffled for the motor sump and some other tricky things for the Nitron suspension. Finally Milltek sent us a new racing-cat and downpipe (the old one was full of piston!) and an EVEN LOUDER exhaust. We want to repeat VLN1 and pick up on some of those goals…
See you soon!
THANKS TO: Kjetil (who worked a week’s worth of hours in 3 days), Milltek Sport, LiteBlox, Revo, Nitron Racing Suspension, Racewear24 for our AMAZING new racesuits, Vollverklebt.de for MORE stickers, and the whole Manheller Racing team!
