2023 was the first year for the team with our Time Attack Project, with the car being run in a very early design stage, essentially a track day spec MX5 when it was first tested at Castle Combe in June. The day of testing showed promise, with the car being very capable in the areas we expected and showing very competitive speeds at all cornering phases, a trait that would continue throughout the season.
Oulton Park was the first competitive outing for the car. No meaningful development work had been done, with the sole aim of the outing being to have the car competition ready in order to gain competition experience and iron out any teething issues that may have arisen.
The car did well at its first event, being 3rd in class on pace due to the wet weather downplaying the impact of being low on power compared to the rest of the class. The Oulton Park Island didn’t massively suit our car due to the amount of low speed acceleration zones, so we were happy with that bit of luck. Clearly our pre-event rain dance worked.
Donington was the first time the car displayed any real development work, which mainly consisted of a simplistic aero package specifically made to gather data on how the car reacted. It was only a £150 package, so we weren’t too worried about the performance overall, and we didn’t bother with the small details such as rounding off the leading edge of the splitter as that wasn’t something we were concerned about for this event. This test was very successful, giving us slightly better straight line speed and a noticeable improvement in general grip, especially at the front end. Old Hairpin at Donington was especially sweet, with the car able to turn in and display respectable grip at 90mph, although the rear end didn’t quite have a grip to hold the turn in speed, so we left the day with some valuable notes on areas to further develop the aero package.
The main highlight of the event and the season was managing to win the single round entry for the class on that day, admittedly largely due to the misfortune of others, but it felt incredible to get our first trophy as a team, it’s the greatest reward any of us could have hoped for.
With the season over, we got to seriously thinking about the details of the car for 2024. We settled on a near complete rebuild of the car, with the main aims to be a completely new power unit, that being the change from the frankly underwhelming stock 1.6 B6-ZE that we had this year to the 13B-MSP rotary from an RX8, essentially doubling the power of the car and allowing us a lot more room for packaging in the front end. Accompanying that will be a completely new aero package, designed based on notes from the experimental setup we ran for Donington, along with further efforts to rebuild the braking hydraulics in order to set the balance and perform considerably better than the stock system, as well as tweaks to most of the chassis elements. This is all with the end goal of taking approximately 10% out of every lap time the car completed in 2023, as well as acting as a better platform for future development.
In terms of this blog and what to expect from it in the future, it’ll largely be longer form posts covering areas of the car we’re developing, as well as some of the thought processes that go into it, including recaps of events such as competition and testing completed by our team. We can’t reveal all our secrets of course, but we can give a good insight into the engineering side of the car that we wouldn’t be able to share with you anywhere else.