build diary

August 19, 2004: So I'm sitting at my desk at work and my boss Bill comes up and asks, "So, have you got the plate for your car yet? We need to do sound testing at the track at 6 tonight." You can imagine that I had the borrowed dealer plate on the car shortly after that!
So the Seven got an early workout. The track is actually a large-ish kart track so it's tight and well suited to small light cars. At least that's what I'd been told. I'd never driven it before.

How did it work? In short, I never expected the car to be this good, this early. Through a series of downhill S bends that involved some good berm hopping, the car swallowed up the bumps and the tail stayed faithfully on line despite my fairly ham-fisted driving. The suspension was obviously working well although it has a lot of lean. It was easy to break the rear end loose with power but the front was well planted. The brakes have a firm, firm pedal and I never really got on them too hard - I was a little tentative with such an unknown car of course! A couple of harder stops showed me that I had to add a little more front bias so I did that on the next straight :)

Noise? Well, the first session was a worst case scenario. The dB meter was set up halfway down the straight, right where I was reaching about 6500 rpm in 2nd. Yes, it's a slow track! The meter was on the left side of the track. Now think about where my exhaust points...Yes, I failed pretty badly. For a second session I popped on my diffuser tip. It's a bit low to the ground and scrapes on all right turns, but it dropped my sound level by 6 or 7 dB - that was enough to make me legal. A BIG thank you to Rodney at Scotty's for the help in setting that up.

There were a couple of problems with the car of course. My right rear brake caliper needs a rebuild as it's leaking slightly. A gasket on a water fitting started to drip a little and the car started to miss under load as time went on. The gasket was fixed this morning and I'll try a good set of coils to see if one of my junkyard units is bad. The most entertaining failure of the night was when my tachometer needle blew off! No, I don't have glass on the gauges yet. That was a bit of a problem but I have to laugh. Now if only I can find another set of needles! Oh, and I can also report that driving this car in the rain is not a terribly pleasant experience even with good wraparound glasses.

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